I've been interpreting the "Don't go to college" mantra as "Don't *automatically* go to college."
If your talents lead you to STEM or the law, then by all means, go to college. But if you're going to college because that's what everyone else is doing, and you don't have any particular plans for what you want to do in college, then DON'T GO TO COLLEGE. It's going to be a waste of time and money. Do something else for a while after high school and figure out what your plans are. Then decide.
The prevalence of this kind of defeatist discourse really illustrates how much of mainstream-adjacent US 'conservatism' is just an assisted suicide machine. Tracing Woodgrains has a great piece on how we are basically at the brink of total exclusion from any kind of elite power: https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/the-republican-party-is-doomed , and this kind of talk helped bring us there. Thanks for countering it.
You write that: "France is the only major country I am aware of that has a significant right-wing counter-elite, certainly as compared to the US and the UK, the two cases I am most familiar with." This seems basically true, but one qualifier I would add is that precisely because it's held in such contempt by it's elite society, the German army and intelligence services seem to be dominated by genuinely hard right types.
Anecdote: my husband went to law school, worked as a lawyer some years. Now, he's more happily a carpenter. He says, "I make less money but I'm richer - and I know how to read and write contracts." It's useful to know how to talk the talk of all kinds of people. Your average tradie doesn't know the lingo of the white collars, nor do they know his, to the detriment of both. So I agree with you, in the sense that an education is an education, and a mind is a terrible thing to waste if you've got it.
Seems like a lot of high-SAT 18-year-olds should find their way to work for Elon Musk, presumably mostly in technical work. There's an opportunity here...
Sounds like there will be a need for two year schools that teach the in depth fundamentals of a skilled trade as well as the basics of business management. These are two separate and distinct skill sets with the first being critical to earning a living as a skilled tradesperson and the second for those that have the motivation and desire to run or own a business related to a skilled trade. I have faith that the market will develop the resources to address this.
Going to the contemporary equivalent of City College isn't the only option nowadays. A parallel right-academia is forming around Hillsdale and some of the smaller Catholic universities, like UMary, UDallas, Ave Maria, and Franciscan.
The benefits are bidirectional: not only are the talented students generally better off and more influential than they would be at a trade school, but the universities gain prestige and influence when they graduate successful talents who might've gone to an Ivy in the past.
We may need to create our own educational institutions, and to support them by preferentially sending our children there and preferentially hiring from them. Most important is devising methods to ensure that we never lose control of those institutions.
College is necessary for credentialism to obtain power in accessible, yet weighted apparatuses; Participation in alternative academic environments is a definitive boon, though, allowing for the possibility of skipping the line and coordinating counter-DEI.
Clubs, dinner parties, online lectures, and religious institutes can be used to intellectually train and position the ambitious.
I've been interpreting the "Don't go to college" mantra as "Don't *automatically* go to college."
If your talents lead you to STEM or the law, then by all means, go to college. But if you're going to college because that's what everyone else is doing, and you don't have any particular plans for what you want to do in college, then DON'T GO TO COLLEGE. It's going to be a waste of time and money. Do something else for a while after high school and figure out what your plans are. Then decide.
The prevalence of this kind of defeatist discourse really illustrates how much of mainstream-adjacent US 'conservatism' is just an assisted suicide machine. Tracing Woodgrains has a great piece on how we are basically at the brink of total exclusion from any kind of elite power: https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/the-republican-party-is-doomed , and this kind of talk helped bring us there. Thanks for countering it.
You write that: "France is the only major country I am aware of that has a significant right-wing counter-elite, certainly as compared to the US and the UK, the two cases I am most familiar with." This seems basically true, but one qualifier I would add is that precisely because it's held in such contempt by it's elite society, the German army and intelligence services seem to be dominated by genuinely hard right types.
Anecdote: my husband went to law school, worked as a lawyer some years. Now, he's more happily a carpenter. He says, "I make less money but I'm richer - and I know how to read and write contracts." It's useful to know how to talk the talk of all kinds of people. Your average tradie doesn't know the lingo of the white collars, nor do they know his, to the detriment of both. So I agree with you, in the sense that an education is an education, and a mind is a terrible thing to waste if you've got it.
Seems like a lot of high-SAT 18-year-olds should find their way to work for Elon Musk, presumably mostly in technical work. There's an opportunity here...
French wisdom as always! Merci 🇫🇷
Sounds like there will be a need for two year schools that teach the in depth fundamentals of a skilled trade as well as the basics of business management. These are two separate and distinct skill sets with the first being critical to earning a living as a skilled tradesperson and the second for those that have the motivation and desire to run or own a business related to a skilled trade. I have faith that the market will develop the resources to address this.
Going to the contemporary equivalent of City College isn't the only option nowadays. A parallel right-academia is forming around Hillsdale and some of the smaller Catholic universities, like UMary, UDallas, Ave Maria, and Franciscan.
The benefits are bidirectional: not only are the talented students generally better off and more influential than they would be at a trade school, but the universities gain prestige and influence when they graduate successful talents who might've gone to an Ivy in the past.
We may need to create our own educational institutions, and to support them by preferentially sending our children there and preferentially hiring from them. Most important is devising methods to ensure that we never lose control of those institutions.
College is necessary for credentialism to obtain power in accessible, yet weighted apparatuses; Participation in alternative academic environments is a definitive boon, though, allowing for the possibility of skipping the line and coordinating counter-DEI.
Clubs, dinner parties, online lectures, and religious institutes can be used to intellectually train and position the ambitious.