Tea at Trianon: Don't Go To College

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 29, 2019

Don't Go To College

From The American Conservative:

Look: too many people go to college as it is. For the middle class, it’s practically mandatory. Teenagers saddle themselves with debt so they can move to new cities, attend nightly orgies, and snore through the same humanities courses they snored through in high school.

Some of them get lucky and land internships at big-time marketing firms, and they’re set for life before they even graduate. But most of them don’t use their degrees, and couldn’t if they tried. I remember one of my professors asking our English honors seminar what we’d read over the summer. “I mostly, like, read articles on Facebook,” one girl explained. “Yeah,” said another, “I was just, like, keeping up with the news.” After cycling through 20 students, I was the only student in the class who had read a book. Even literature majors don’t care about literature. Why on earth are they there?

This was at the University of Sydney—which, as my fellow alumnus Clive James quipped, likes to think of itself as “Oxford or Cambridge laterally displaced approximately 12,000 miles.” I was baffled they got into the honors program at all. Then I realized that, if you’re good at doing school stuff, you can excel in any of the humanities. Memorize factoids for a test, write an essay telling the professor what he wants to hear, make a controversial and vaguely relevant comment in a tutorial, and boom! You’re a Bachelor of Arts.

But what do you have to show for it? Again, maybe you befriended a low-level executive who can give your fledgling career a boost. Maybe your college has a strong alumni network. But while companies all but require applicants to have a Bachelor’s in something, they all know it doesn’t imply that you’re competent in any way. Unless they need someone to write Freudo-Marxist analyses of Sense and Sensibility. In which case, you’re set. (Read more.)