Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Y'know, I'm sure this little nugget o'news will have Fadduh Smiff yelling told'jaso! regarding overeducation and empty credentialing, but perhaps it isn't so much that the degree is less valuable than it is that all the jobs paying decent wages and require that one be at least slightly smarter than a turnip have all been shipped out of the country, leaving us with turnip-level-intelligence jobs for turnip-level-intelligence people. But, still...

"we need to stop fostering illusions that good educations can ever substitute for the organized collective action - in politics, in the workplace, and in the streets - that will be required to reverse the increasingly miserable future."

...gets me to thinking about all the big heroes of American workers from early in the last century -- Joe Hill, Sacco'n'Vanzetti, Eugene Debs, and the like -- and wondering how much formal education any of them had? I'm guessing a fair smattering may have had some college, but back in those days... hell, I'm betting a whole lot of them may have been lucky to have finished high school. (Once again, I hold up my high-school drop-out, Army "lifer", Hemingway and James Joyce-reading, American West history-self-educating, longhair be-bop jazz-record-playing Dad as an example.)

Mike: Your dad sounds like a cool cat. What are/were his politics?

"If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident. Our words - our lives - our pains - nothing! The taking of our lives - lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler - all! That last moment belong to us - that agony is our triumph." Bartolomeo Vanzetti

In over forty years of teaching, I never had a student say something as powerful as this. I have never said anything remotely as moving as this. No college degree for Vanzetti.

I had this quote from Finley Peter Dunne on my office door. I paraphrase as I have not been in that office for a long time: "Do you think the colleges have done much good for the world?" to which the answer is "Do you think it is the wheel that makes the water run?" Maybe someone has the exact quote with the appropriate brogue.

"D'ye think th' colledges has much to do with th' progress iv of the wurruld?" asked Mr Hennessy.
"D'ye think," said Mr Dooley, "tis th' mill that makes th' water run?"

- Finley Peter Dunne, "Colleges and Degrees," from Mr. Dooley's Opinions (1900)

http://books.google.com/books?id=EahaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA199&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

Somewhat ironically, I read a lot of Finley Peter Dunne in college. A course on Mark Twain included writing a paper on one of Twain's contemporary humorists. I chose Dunne, having read and liked the occasional Dooley quote in newspaper columns back in ye olde days. The university library had all of the Dooley books.

Thanks, Antonello. That's the quote all right!