Let’s talk about education.
If there is one thing egalitarian about the United States, it is the belief that everyone is entitled to a free public education. Everyone is entitled to be educated well enough that they can make a living as an adult to support themselves and/or their family.
In the beginning, young men were entitled to become apprentices at no cost to themselves to learn trades.
Young men and later young women were taught to read, write and do arithmetic so that they could qualify for jobs without having to go into debt to learn them.
By the middle of the 19th century, most communities had free public schools and students were able to learn enough — usually by eighth grade and age 14 — to start a job that would provide a decent living. My paternal grandfather was born in 1895 and left school after eighth grade. His early jobs were manual labor, but he had a career first as a police officer and then as police chief in his home town from before Pearl Harbor into the early 1950s.
And no student loans ever.
Even into the late 1950s, those who weren’t scholastically inclined could get a menial labor job without finishing high school. Their chances of owning a home and/or supporting a family weren’t great, but hard work could sometimes win through.
But anyone wanting a high school diploma could get one for free and that would lead to a decent life.
With no student loan debt starting out.
But a lot of things changed in the 1970s that made it much worse for young people starting out. First off, far more young men had been going to college to avoid Vietnam. Second, millions of women — many single and many married seeking second family incomes — were all of a sudden competing for jobs.
Those two factors alone made the job market much more competitive, and employers who had been requiring high school graduates started demanding college graduates. For the first time, people who hadn’t felt the need to go to college found they did need to, and the college loan market was doing big business.
And it got worse, thanks at least in part due to a much higher percentage of jobs than weren’t the result of local ownership. When local companies were branches of nationally and internationally owned corporations, local management had little or no control over budgets.
Branches that once had 100 employees now had 50. Companies that once demanded bachelor’s degrees now demanded master’s degrees.
And kids who legitimately wanted better lives went deep into debt to finance graduate school, law school or medical school. They didn’t realize they would pay and pay and still have massive debt heading into middle age.
My son graduated in 2007 without debt, but friends of his who took out loans to go to graduate school were still paying on loans 15 years later and had not been able to get even entry-level jobs in their chosen fields.
The neofascists in the Republican Party have convinced the Trumpanzees and others that student loan forgiveness is an elitist move designed to spit in the faces of people who took out loans and repaid them.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s a shame people can’t take a more charitable attitude and say hey, I got screwed but you shouldn’t have to.
After all, aren’t our billionaires rich enough?
It seems to me it would be wonderful to go back to an America where education is affordable — if not free — for everyone?