Return of the effete corps of impudent snobs

[supergee]

In the world according to Rick Santorum (and Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh), the university-educated are the real One Percent who lord it over the Lord’s people. These fancy folks dare not call themselves by their true name—a French word, not accidentally, with one of those tricky accent marks over the initial é, and how appropriate for a concept so radically un-American. This élite is made up of secular zombies who smash sacred tablets, sneer at hard-working people, use fancy words, and otherwise try to convince the world that they are entitled to lounge around the ski slopes noshing on multigrain bread and Chilean sea bass while Joe the Plumber is busy whacking at government tentacles so that he can afford a decent steak.

Todd Gitlin on the guy who thinks "snob" means someone who wants everybody to go to college

Comments

OK, for real now...

[marahmarie]

Their point (and they do have one) is that it shouldn't take a college education to make it in the US. You should be able to work your way up anywhere and learn anything as you go (with on-the-job training, study courses at home, etc.) and enjoy decent wages and benefits along the way. The "snobbish" insistence on college makes non-college-level work seem lower in importance which leads to such jobs being held by people who are in turn under-appreciated by society for how hard they work and how much they help all of us by doing work that the college-educated US majority cannot or will not do.

They have a good point. Could they phrase it better? Hell yes. All this "elitist" crap just pushes us all further apart. But otherwise, I tend to agree with them entirely on this.