One of the things I like to teach my students is that they have no intellectual inferiority in regard to the Ivy League schools.

On the face of it, that may sound ridiculous, but it is not.

A great many of these heavily lauded (and immensely well paid) graduates of the schools blessed by the establishment have participated wholly and happily in the greatest financial debacle in history. Their well honed degrees disguised their incompetence, their stupidity, their lack of intellectual depth and their overwhelming sense of entitlement.

My student are minimally superior in that they have not severely damaged the economic structure of their nation.

The fact that so many of these Ivy Leaguers journey off to cash in their degrees and their honor in various financial firms is a black mark against our educational system. You see, we depend on this system to produce the scholars, the politicians, and all those various professions which make nations function with honor and purpose. Instead we get a rush of graduates toward a predatory system of financial institutions.

Many of my students, quite possibly all, will have a larger purpose in their lives than playing with other people’s money. Of course, it is likely that there will be a few bad apples, but that is true among all large groups of people.

Are the elite schools creators of the best and brightest? I don’t believe that any more. They are often the leaders of the nation? But the current situations is hardly a testament to capability and well balanced education.

But my students would try to take care of their fellow citizens never forgetting where they came from and the struggle they must make to simply get a job in the current market. They deserve better. Nevertheless, from this crop is my hope, that these people, these individuals working to better themselves will be the leaders of tomorrow, not the children of the elite, not the well favored few, but my students.

My students have a sense of inferiority to these people. But these graduates of these “special” schools have no advantage in learning or intelligence. They thrive on their contacts. They prosper based on economics that favors what they do as more important than the producers of this nation, the people that actually make things.

It is not a matter of free will or gumption that keeps my students from being as successful as those. It is a well ingrained attitude, a lack of expectations, and a consistent contempt and suspicion of the educated. We can do better. We, the citizens, have a responsibility to our children to act the part of guides and supporters. I do not mean the blind support given whatever the merits. I mean a willingness to encourage excellence and the hard, difficult job of not submitting to the idea that some people are better. They are better when they prove it. My student can prove their excellence.

But learning is not just a matter of schooling. It is a life long endeavor. Most people stop when they put that piece of paper on the wall. But that is all they are, paper, wood pulp. If my students are to change this state, this country, and this world, there must be support and dedication to a lifetime of learning. A person who continues the task of development, of becoming, is inferior to no learner on earth, whatever their degree.

There are books and as long as there are books – as long as the great works of mankind – are readily available, any human being can become educated and developed. Any individual can build the power of understanding, a basic command of the ideas that govern this society, and a sense of purpose in their lives. But we have to believe. My students need that. My students need to walk in a community where people believe they are just as good, just as smart and just as capable as students from anywhere in the world.

My students cannot get into Harvard or Yale. They do not have parents who give hundreds of thousands of dollars to these institutions. Their parents did not go and thus they can’t get in as a “legacy.” (A legacy means that no matter how pitiful a student was, if he graduates, his children automatically get in. Well, fish rot from the head.)

All they have is the power of their minds and the determination of their hearts. If they only believe.

James Pilant