Education Matters

I'll start off by admitting my bias: I am a huge believer in education, especially, but certainly not only, a liberal arts education. My great grandparents on my mother's side emigrated from Sweden to the United States; my great grandfather was a waiter. For immigrant families, education was both a tremendous part of the promise of America: free public education! It was also still, to some extent, out of reach. Thus, when times got tough and someone had to drop out of school and go to work, it was often the young women in the family who were pulled out of high school and sent to the mill, or factory, or to the hotel where maids were needed.

My maternal grandmother met that fate, leaving school to help support the family by making hotel beds while her brothers continued on through high school. I think that when my mother told me that story I was maybe five or six. It truly was one of my first intimations that I had landed on a planet with a patriarchial problem. As a little girl, all I could say was, "But that's not fair!"

My mom, orphaned at an early age, made it her goal to get through high school. The youngest of three sisters, she didn't have to quit school in order to support anyone else. As a result, she got an office job instead of a job at the hotel, the office job where she met my dad.

My dad actually had that elusive thing, a college degree. He was the first in his family of Western beet farmers and horse trainers to get a college degree, although his mother had gotten a few years at a ladies musical conservatory before she left to marry my horse-trainer granddad. My dad got that college degree as a gift from a grateful country; he like many other young men of his generation survived World War II to come home to the GI Bill. The GI Bill paid my dad's college tuition. He worked while he was in college, cooking breakfast in one of the women's dorms at the University of Colorado -- something he considered less than taxing, according to his stories.

If I ever got any message at all from my parents, it was: You Will Go To College. College was, in their minds, the key to being able to participate in the world of ideas and to living a better material life, a more worry-free life, than that enjoyed by waiters, hotel maids, and horse trainers. And, oldest child that I was, I absorbed the lesson, earning bachelors, masters, and law degrees. As a percentage of my income, I paid far more for Son's Montessori schooling than for his degree at Princeton, mostly because the Montessori paid dividends and Son got great scholarships and financial aid. He also took out some student loans and took out more when he went to law school.

All of which is a long wind up for saying that I think it is fucking criminal that kids today can't afford a college education without taking out huge private loans in addition to their student loans. We're the richest country on Earth. We can piss billions of dollars a month down the hole of the boyking's vanity war. We can absorb the externalities caused by millions of fools driving Hummers and SUVs and we can pay athletes millions of dollars a year. We can afford tax cuts for Paris Hilton. It is a crying fucking shame that we can't send our bright young people to college.