Guest Post: Searching for the Übermensch in Universal Post-Secondary Education

From the ashes of civilization, the Philosophers will emerge from their forest hermitages and subsequently inherit the earth. Here is such a philosopher, hailing from Bremerton, Washington, and bringing with him musings inspired by the wild and wonderful Pacific Northwest. Please welcome Brett Aho, today's guest author and author of the blog "Searching for the Übermensch," who will be contributing philosophical insights to CR from time to time. Today's entry is cross-blogged to Conflict Revolution from http://brettaho.blogspot.com.

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UNIVERSAL POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION
By Brett Aho

One of the unfortunate phenomena of partisan politics is the manifestation of a blanket of deference one weaves for any set of ideals espoused by a certain party or politician. A shining example of this came in the past month, when the well-polarized Senator Rick Santorum made comments to a crowd about college education.

“President Obama has said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob… There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, and put their skills to test, who aren't taught by some liberal college professor (who) tries to indoctrinate them. I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."

If you can untangle the basic gist of his statement from the jungle of populist conservative positioning, you will see that he’s simply stating, “not everybody needs to go to college”, which in itself is not an entirely unreasonable statement to make. Unlike most severely conservative viewpoints, it actually raises a topic worthy of debate.

The question of whether or not it best serves a society to educate most or all of it’s citizens beyond a high school level is something whose primary arguments should not dip into the large pool of religious doctrine. However, the line of argument that Santorum takes comes very close.

Santorum's basic argument claims that Obama promotes universal post-secondary education as a way to turn everybody into a liberal. Statistics do show that when education levels increase, religious adherence diminishes, and that the college educated tend to be liberal while the less educated tend to be conservative. I fear that Santorum has too long focused his energies on party divisions.

A better argument for the same cause would appear along the lines of division of labor. One could readily create a reasoned argument that a society is better served by a population that promotes a division of labor between an educated class and a non-educated class.

The major obstacle in this line of thinking is the broadly accepted ideal of a fully educated society. Long have humans, religious and non-religious alike, held the ideal that more education is an inherently good thing. People believe that the perfect society would have a fully educated population, well read in the fine arts and exceedingly knowledgeable about physics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy. However at the same time, most will also acknowledge that this is not a realistic ideal.

Therefore, to maintain a degree of objectivity in the debate, one must release all former valuations of the subject, approach the question from a neutral standpoint, and transvalue all formerly accepted ideals in relation to the question at hand.

Only if a conservative can drop education as a perceived threat to his own values, and a liberal can drop education as a perceived benefit of his own ideal world-view, can a debate open up to the true societal costs and benefits of universal post-secondary education.