Links for 04/24/15 | National Catholic Reporter

Links for 04/24/15 | National Catholic Reporter by MSW. MGB: Jackson Lears essay is horrible, jumping from a sceed on a term he does not seem to understand - which now applies to Bill and Hillary Cliton, Tony Blair and libertarian economists Hayek, Freidman and von Mises.  I don't see that ideology pulling anyone out of the humanities.  Instead, it is because at some point if you are in a non-major and non-general education (formally known as distribution) course, you can only go so far because the upper level courses are reserved for majors.  Even the humanities.Is political science a humanity?  Probably not, although we tended to take lots of history too and at Loras College had history faculty teach our foreign policy courses. We also had a series of compartive politics courses that were anything but Neo-liberal - and they certainly werer not neo-conservative.  MSW would have freaked out in a semester of Middle Eastern Politics taught by Professor Clark.  Lets just say he did not care what the zionists thought of him (not that there were many on campus. If there are neo-liberal schools, they would be George Mason University - the von Mises Institute and the University of Chicago.  But that is only certain departments. As for the impetus to get a job - if you cannot, Graduate School helps.



The Department of Education also has a program to pay only ten percent of your income for ten years for student loans, which only works if you are working. If you get on the forebearance track, the capitalization of interest is by far a bigger worry.  Get rid of that piece of it and the financial statement of DEd will likely be more acurate, as more and more of us die with student debt that is not inheritable, which he does mention.  His remarks on having an education that can give you a job are an interesting counterpoint to Jackson Lears essay, which condemns that practice.  My suggestion is still to combine the first two years of college with the last two of high school, both at public expense (including Catholic school), with employers hiring people before junior year and funding the rest of education (with a service requirement and a tax credit to lower the cost).



The essay by Gershon on Brooks is interesting.  I wonder how he compares it to The Book of Virtues by William Bennet?  This is definitely part of the conservative literary tradition.  I hope we are not so far gone that this is considered reactionary,  I expect you might even find this character study at AA Club book shelves where outside literature is sold (though not for meetings).  The work of Bill W. is of this calibre.  I wonder if he was included in those biographed?