Back in the 60’s and 70’s you could answer an ad on the back of a matchbook and for a few bucks and some half-assed schoolwork, you could get a diploma from some phantom school with a prestigious sounding name. These “schools” were known as diploma mills. The diploma, of course, wasn’t worth the paper it was mimeo’d on, but an inattentive employer may not bother to check to see if it came from an accredited school. In the real academic world you still had to pass tests and write papers and meet certain standards to graduate high school, let alone college. If you weren’t meeting the minimum requirements to pass from one grade in school to the next, you either went to summer school or you repeated the whole year in the same grade. It was just the accepted way of doing things, and it worked. Students actually learned to read and write and do simple math without a calculator.

Then it all changed. Suddenly it was taboo to have a child repeat a grade. It was “traumatic” for the child. It seemed to happen about the same time it became child abuse to smack your kids on the butt when they stepped out of line. Discipline now meant sticking the kid in a corner for a “time out.” Ego boosting was all the rage. Every kid was a winner. Each week brought a new Student of the Week so that every Soccer Mom could proudly display her kid’s sticker on the back of her minivan. God forbid, you couldn’t traumatize the poor child by holding them back. They had to move on with their peers even though they couldn’t read or write. All the teachers’ fault anyway.

Eventually Little Miss Student of the Week was shoved from one grade to the next without ever learning a thing. Young Mister Student of the Month had an ego the size of the Goodyear blimp, but the IQ of a fern. Discipline in schools came to a screeching halt and school administrators weren’t allowed to do a thing, lest they get sued. Passing grades became a matter of semi-regular attendance. Whole classes of students were paraded across the stage to receive a diploma most of them couldn’t even read. The diploma mills of the previous decade had become the high schools of the day.

Fast forward a decade or so and now you have students with meaningless high school diplomas entering college in droves. What’s a college to do when 80% of the freshman class does not possess the minimum skills required for acceptance? Higher education is, after all, a business. Tuition pays the bills. No students means no tuition which means no college. Simple answer, lower your standards. Allow anyone with a high school diploma and a pulse to attend classes, as long as they pay their bills. But wait, if you grade them as you’ve graded classes from the past, you’d have to fail too many students. Too many failing students means too many dropouts which means no tuition and you’re back to the original dilemma. So again, lower your standards. So what if Johnny Jockstrap can’t spell. You can get the gist of his paper. And he really is a good running back. And Becky Bubblehead? Well, her English skills aren’t the best, but you can’t hold that against her.  

I’ll be the first to agree that a college education should be available to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Higher education should not just be a perk for the wealthy. But the idea that everyone “deserves” a college education is wrong. A college education should be earned. A college edcuation should mean something. It should be an indicator of a person’s ability to read and comprehend and learn. If a person graduates from college or a university and cannot spell simple words or do simple math or string together original thoughts to form sentences and paragraphs, then the college or university has failed to benefit the student or society as a whole. If everyone truly does “deserve” a college education, then a college education will become something everyone has, regardless of their abilities. And when everyone has a diploma which in reality means nothing, then the diploma becomes worthless.

Where will we be in 20 years when the vast majority of workers entering the workforce have higher education diplomas, many of which are worthless? Will a Masters degree be the new entry level requirement? Even those are up for grabs these days. You don’t even have to set foot in a campus building. You can take a few Mickey Mouse courses online and earn a PhD. Name your topic, pay the price, and Saint Thomas Federal University will send you a link where you can download your new sheepskin.

When did words become so weighty? Have they always been so? Or are we all becoming seriously over-sensitive to them? You can hardly read the news without coming across a story where one person or group was offended or appalled at something said by another person or group. Politicians, who are loath to display the level of their ignorance by actually discussing the issues, would rather hurl indignities back and forth at each other. “How dare they say something like that! I demand an apology!” A celebrity can end his or her career by uttering the wrong word or telling an off-color joke. Someone is sure to be offended and strike up a boycott, causing the corporate pimps to dump the celeb’s sponsorship like a bad habit.

But do words really hurt us so badly? Are our egos and psyches so fragile that they can be permanently damaged by a word or two from some stranger we may not even respect? Maybe we all just enjoy an occasional roll in the mud of self-pity and indignation. Maybe we’re beginning to feel entitled to a life without even the faintest trace of hardship. We’re all so accustomed to “student of the week” and “everybody’s a winner” that the mere hint of something other than praise is suddenly intolerable.

Of course there are those annointed few who are not only allowed to sling crap, but are actually paid huge amounts of money to do so. So called “shock jocks” like Imus and Howard Stern have made careers of offending people, yet even they have paid the price for offending the wrong group of particularly entitled people. And even then, it wasn’t what was said, but who said it. Apparently people in the same entitled group are free to insult others in that group, but God forbid someone outside the group does the same. Republicans were aghast that Clinton had an affair with an intern, yet they turn a blind eye to the far more despicable sins of the Bush administration. Democrats rail against the corruption they see on the right, yet they seem to ignore corruption within their own ranks. A Democratic senator from Massachusetts was excoriated for “waffling” on the issues, yet the current Republican front runner, a former governor of the same state, is free to change his stance as the situation dictates. Indignations all around.

It’s really becoming necessary to think about everything you want to say beforehand and play a sort of mental chess to determine all the possible interpretations so as not to offend anyone. Think about how much has changed in just a few decades and then extrapolate a few decades into the future. What turn of phrase that we accept now will become offensive in 20 years or so? When we’ve finally eliminated all offending names, jokes, images, and stereotypes for every person on earth, what will the Courtesy Police wring their hands about?

Sorry if I’ve offended anyone.

Think you have a good handle on world events? Got a good picture of what’s going on in Iraq or Afghanistan? If you said yes, guess again. The world, and the Middle East especially, is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. If you can see 5 or 10 pieces fitting together, you’re far ahead of most people. Yet you are still not seeing the whole picture.

I spent last weekend with my nephew, who returned from a tour in Iraq this past summer. He’s a higher ranking non-com who worked in a headquarters operations group. He’s a go-to guy who’s seen a lot. I’ve always felt we Americans have not been getting the whole story, either on the good side or the bad, but this past weekend’s discussions really drove home that point. The newsies filter everything to fit their needs. Doesn’t matter which side of the fence either. They all chop short sound bites out of long interviews with military leaders and paste them all together to shape the story to their liking. They find a talking head who will say what they want to hear and then present the head’s opinion as fact, even though most of the heads know diddly-squat. Everything that goes on in Iraq and Afghanistan is vetted before release to assess its political volitility. Much of it never gets released at all. There are so many variables to consider. How will this event affect the situation in Pakistan? If we release this news and it makes Russia look bad, will they tell the world about the dumb thing the US did? How will this event affect the upcoming elections?

Then there’s the fiasco surrounding military funding. Which branch gets the most? To what lengths will the other branches go in order to increase their piece of the pie? How many soldiers will die simply because their branch wanted more money? And most urgently, how long before we’ve exhausted the whole military? 

Maybe it’s good we don’t know everything. Maybe we really “can’t handle the truth,” as the saying goes. There’s a nagging fear in the back of my mind that things are not good and are going to get much worse. Maybe it’s time to make like an ostrich and just stick my head in the sand. Maybe I just don’t want to know.