My post, The Dumbest Quote for the Day, attracted some comments on Facebook. Here’s my lead paragraph.

I teach in Northwest Arkansas. Students here tend to feel that because they are from Arkansas and go to a small college that they are going to have trouble competing with students from name schools. I always tell them that they are just as smart as students from anywhere in the country. As evidence of this, I point to the litany of stupidity, overreaching and greed by these graduates of name universities in the banking industy.

These gentlemen have commented on my posts before. They have a lot to say.

Here are their comments.

Andrew Gates I started my education at Georgia Southern University and am ending it at Georgia Tech. Its my opinion that students from smaller schools have more interaction with the real world. This makes them more prepared to handle, and manage, the real world. I would engineer for a company managed by one of your students before I would engineer under a harvard business grad, hands down!

Kevin Stebbings The problem is rather that they are too smart; they have not experienced limitations and therefore think they can model and manipulate a system which is truly outside their control. You may be setting your students up for failure to say they can compete with Harvard or MIT mathematicians. Believe me, I went to school with a handful that went on to those places and they SCARE me. Their intelligence is not to be downplayed or trifled with. In purporting an arm of the American dream here as you are, you are supporting the great lie that led some of these people to do the foolish things that they did. Knowing one’s place is better advice.

Andrew Gates Kevin: what if George Washington had given that advice to the Continental Congress? Where would we be? There is more to a man than just his intelligence. The human will is the catalyst for all great human accomplishments. I go to school with some guys that are more intelligent than me, and some that are less intelligent than me. The reason we have all made it this far is because what we lack in intelligence, we make up for, respectively, in sheer will power and hard work. There is no lie or falsehood in that idea of the American dream.

Kevin Stebbings I am quite and fully aware of that and was from the start. I would not argue that people should not try and I would not argue that sheer tested intelligence is all there is to it. Never, would I argue that. But my friend the American dream is both evil and a lie. Every highschool student who had read the Great Gatsby ought to know that. The American dream is a lie of the people in charge that keeps those beneath mentally enslaved; fighting for a dream that does not serve them….born ceaselessly back into the past or whatever the last line of that halfway tolerable book was.

Andrew Gates Ah. I see what you are saying. I think you confuse the idea of the American dream with the way in which it is used and manipulated.

I think one of the fundamental flaws shared by all of the most popular political and economic systems is that they all diverge from reality as the population size of the society grows. For instance, I think any small village of people (a few hundred people at most) can effectively operate as a market economy with relatively little problem. Likewise, I think another village of the same size can effectively operate as a communist society with relatively little problem.

The reason is because in that type of society, everyone knows everyone else. Interaction with your fellow villager is both imminent and necessary. You are much LESS likely to try and rip off a man when you know you have to see him on sunday at church or when you need something that he produces. A village is also much less tolerant of what it perceives to be immoral or unjust behavior when the village is small.

As a society grows in size and number, citizens become more and more anonymous in respect to each other. There is no way that any one American citizen personally knows even 0.001% of our population. This anonymity breeds apathy. This apathy, mixed with size of our society seems to dilute the impact that crime and immoral behavior has on the society as a whole. In a small village, a murder is a HUGE deal, because it could be the towns only doctor, or the towns only blacksmith, but in our society, that sense of urgency seems a little diluted because each citizen, more or less, is replaceable.

I said all of that to say that the idea of the American dream is not what the evil here. The idea that you can lead a happy life if you work hard and provide for yourself is, in of itself, a good idea in my opinion. The lack of moral behavior, especially from the rich and powerful, has led to them using this idea and twisting it into something it was never meant to be.

James Pilant I think very little of the “American Dream.” However, if you think I mean their education is the same, I’m not teaching that. I’m teaching that their inherent intelligence and what they can draw from their minds, their souls, is just as good as those people’s. jp

James Pilant I want to blog the whole thing!
jp

Andrew Gates Be my guest!