Omakase

Amazon Search

Your Assignment

In many college campuses, incoming freshmen are assigned a book to read during their pre-term summer, or in the early weeks of the first semester. The theory is that the students will be “grounded” in at least one book before branching off in their separate threads. Would you like to know what’s being assigned?

Books about multiculturalism, immigration or racism were the most prevalent (60 colleges), followed by environmental issues (36 colleges), the Islamic world (27 colleges), New Age or spiritual books (25 colleges), and issues related to the Holocaust or genocide (25 colleges). Only 6 colleges assigned classics. The study also looked for other patterns in the selections, and reported that 46 of the choices have a film version, 29 are about Africa, 9 are related to Hurricane Katrina and 5 are about dysfunctional families.

The report cites several issues with the selections. “We found the preponderance of reading assignments promotes liberal social causes and liberal sensibilities. Of the 180 books, 126 (70 percent) either explicitly promote a liberal political agenda or advance a liberal interpretation of events. By contrast, the study identifies only three books (less than 2 percent) that promote a conservative sensibility and none that promote conservative political causes.”

Moving beyond ideology, the report says that “the books selected for common reading are generally pitched at an intellectual level well below what should be expected of college freshmen.

Most parents recognize that the cost of getting a kid through college these days has mushroomed alarmingly. It’s not uncommon to see undergrads emerge from the ivy-panoplied parapets into the world with over $100k in college loans atop their shoulders. But cost is an objective feature, and by itself without context. If you place cost in the numerator of an equation, and quality in the denominator, you’ll recognize the dual hit.

Some universities are claiming that the assignment of “beach books” to incoming freshman is a kind of micro-core curriculum, and a way of attempting to overcome the deficiencies of the secondary school system. Others might look at the selection and opine that, rather than overcoming these deficiencies, the academy is taking them on.

Share

63 comments to Your Assignment

  • byrdman

    Maryland public schools: My kids (1st and 3rd) regularly bring home bios and favorable comments (esp. near elections) on how great their elementary school is and how fortunate we are to have Obama followed closely by Green propoganda on how we live, work, build, etc… The best indoctrination starts young. Our kids will be well trained should they ever walk the halls of the elite.

    • virgil xenophon

      So it’s EXACTLY as bad as old geezers like me have feared, eh, byrdman? Barkeep! That’ll be another double, please…

      • byrdman

        Oh wait, incoming message from the PTA telling me how to advocate at some county council meeting March 1. Yup, full blown Action Alert from the PTA Council of Frederick County, Inc. You’d think the Inc. part would attract some attention.

  • Subguy

    Virgil-rest assured it is worse than you imagine. In my case, it is Dad vs the CA public school system. Can a single Naval Officer successfully combat all the indoctrination that his two children receive coming up from elementary school through High School? Global warming, US History, the role of the state, it is never too early for California educators to mold young minds to the correct answers.
    So far I think I am holding my own, son more than daughter.

    • Zane

      You know how you combat it? You pull them out. Homeschool, the way it’s been done throughout history.

      I’m telling you all, John Taylor Gatto is the red pill. One of his valuable points is that compulsion schooling is a machine. No use characterizing it as evil, no use debating with it–that way lies madness. All you can do is sabotage it, screw with its workings, or escape it.

      • byrdman

        Homeschooling at the exclusion of public schooling trains a kid for a world that don’t exist; they’ll have to learn to deal with the lunacy one way or another. Sucks either way.

        My thought: take back the public schools. Parents need to speak with your kids teachers, uncomfortably, consistently. Otherwise the voting block only chops one way.

        • Zane

          From the very beginning state-run schools in the USA have been modeled on the Prussian school systems which were explicitly designed to break children’s national bonds with parents and church and increase their dependence on the state. This was not an accident.

          Compulsion schooling trains children for a life of dependency–on the corporation, on the state. Is that the world free American children should be trained to? Better, I think, to teach them that such dependency is lunacy, and to think and act for themselves. No state school, anywhere, will ever do that.

          • byrdman

            Zane, I agree with your thoughts but one. Seperate doesn’t kill the beast going forward, homeschooled vs. public schooled demographics is a losing hand. The republic shall not endure if her people don’t keep her. That behaviour is taught.

            My kids don’t even keep their own pencils. Notes come home saying ‘your student may need ___ supplies’. I’ve learned that they are not for my kid, but that there is a communal supply. All the time spent scratching names on my kids scissors was for naught. These are things that you don’t think to question at first. I was quicker on the book sales, flower sales, t shirt sales, candy sales, required homework folder sales, etc. as we get them several in a week. No doubt supporting core values.

            My point being we’re a couple generations into this; take care of your kids, but don’t give them your neighbors either. Your freedom and liberty is tied to theirs.

            Tilt at the windmills…

          • Heather

            Zane, from another Gatto aficionado, I thought you’d like this:

            “Freedom of education, being an essential of civil and religious liberty, as well as a necessity for the development of intelligence, must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever. We are opposed to State interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government.”
            ~Democratic Party Platform of 1892

            :-D

        • Taking back the public school system is a herculean task. I’m not altogteher opposed to it but homeschooling worked for us. (Elementary school only). Three young men now: one ME and two EE’s with graduate degree. We were able to inculcate our values and disciplines in the early years.

      • Pixelkiller

        You can google him. You can buy from C-Span his interview on Book notes. The man had it wired.

  • G-man

    Dang, I missed that part of the summer “beach book” reading after I graduated HS. Spent that summer taking a night class of second semester calculus and diffy q’s. Tweren’t a female in the class. Did have to read “Silent Spring” in biology tho.

    And +1 to Zane – this “we control the curriculum, we control the reading list, we determine good from bad” even has literature teachers changing the classics so that books like Huck Finn don’t use the “n” word.

  • I wrote an article a couple weeks ago for American Express OPENforum including this paragraph:

    A recent study followed more than 2,000 college students from 2005 to 2009 at 24 different U.S. colleges and universities. What the researchers found was that many college graduates leave school without critical thinking skills or the verbal and written communications skills that used to be the essence of a college education. Forty-five percent of the students didn’t improve their reasoning or writing skills at all in the first two years of school and 36 percent hadn’t improved higher-order thinking skills (analysis, synthesis and evaluation) by the time they graduated. Those that did improve, on average, only went from the 50th to the 68th percentile.

    • Zane

      Yeah, but so what–the colleges made money! They improved our GDP! What’s the total now, more than $850 billion in student loans, to be paid back by baristas, from what I can see (http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/college/2010-09-10-student-loan-debt_N.htm).

      $850 billion, and increasing by $60 million a day.

      Tie that to those graphs Lex just posted, and you can see we’re in deep, deep trouble, the kind that can make the Jasmine revolutions look like a mere warm-up act. A lot of Americans with a lot of debt and no hope of ever repaying it.

      Double-plus ungood.

    • Good article Tom and yes, that’s the sort of person(s) I’d want to hire. We’re not going to develop critical thinkers using Oprah’s book of the month.

      P.S.Aerodite: Well read aviator? Is that possible? ;)

  • Grizzled Coastie

    I weep for the future. I have tried and tried and tried to boil down the root causes of this madness that eats at the foundations of our society like water and limestone. I guess it stems from a lack of Judeo-Christian ethics. When you don’t have any sort of foundation, you are the literal house on the sand that Jesus spoke of. These folks, who believe in nothing, now control the levers of power and influence. Hollywood, education, the media is all their domain. They don’t care that you’re not going to be able to get a job, except a government one, with a women’s studies or other useless bit of sheepskin. They don’t care that instead of doing what college is supposed to do, facilitate critical thinking and broaden one’s horizons, they have turned them into indoctrination centers where graduates emerge like the sausage in “The Wall” out of the grinder, all cut from the same hey-ho-western-civilization-has-got-to-go slab of meat.

    This is just another symptom of it. But if this is comforting, I doubt many incoming freshmen are reading any of this tripe. That last summer tends to go by in a flash and I doubt too many will spend it getting indoctrinated in the “correct” way of thinking.

  • SK1

    All parenting starts with instilling the right values….I have 4 children and they have been taught to have their own minds about all things, including politics.

    The Eldest and I have regular debates about the issues – we don’t always agree but we have a healty respect for each other.

    Let the lefties rant – The “weak minded” will be swayed….My kids have seen what the idjits preach and know the difference between what is right and what is liberal lefty commie Bull-Shite.

  • virgil xenophon

    When our son was in HS in Louisville in the early 90s he was enrolled in one of the arguably 3 best pvt schools in the city, Just a cursory glance at his hist textbooks alone made me think: “If this is how watered-down (FORGET the PC aspect, bad as it is) the curriculum in the BEST of the supposedly superior pvt schools is, then what about the worst of the public ones?” Now layer the PC-driven leftist indoctrination agenda on top….it’s amazing that ANYONE emerges anything other than brain-dead…as the continuing plunge of SAT scores demonstrate..

    (The wife of close friends who was a teacher who, over 30 yrs taught in almost every segment of the Louisville school system–inner city previously all-black Central High, “upscale” loosey-goosey Atherton in the Highlands where skate-boarding druggie sons & daughters of professional yuppies attended, “traditional” curriculum-oriented , heavy discipline Make High, and a special school for pregnant girls–would relate tales/insights both once hilarious and utterly discouraging…all-told, this son of a 2nd-grade teacher mother and college professor (and with an aunt who taught for 30 yrs in CA plus two uncles who were first principles, then Superintendent of schools, in major metro areas of Illinois) who grew up on a college campus and attended its Lab School has seen and heard it all over the years…PTSD time…)

    • virgil xenophon

      *** “MALE High” viz Make” LOL

      • virgil xenophon

        PPS:LOL, I forgot another aunt who was a HS librarian!

        • virgil xenophon

          Should I DOUBLE my ration of Barbancourt–or half it? LOL..”principal” viz HS “Principle” I vote for double–my fingers are too jittery–either as the result of the night before or early onset of Parkinsons–either way. an excuse for MOAR I say!

          • Quartermaster

            Lots moar! It’ll settle you down. Have a double as well. You’ll feel real good as the world goes to pieces about you.

          • SCOTTtheBADGER

            The BadgerMom once told me that ED Degrees are popular because they are not all that hard to get, and many people find that they don’t cut too far into thier drinking time. So you have a certain percentage of people who get thiers so they can teach, and others because they don’t have to waste too much time in non self indulgence. So they then graduate, and we wind up with the same percentages of real and pseudo teachers, who have to qualifications to do anything other than become parasites on the public body. Watch Ann Althouse’s videos of the protestors on the Capital Square, and you will easily tell which group the protestors belong to.

            Unions were formed so workers would get thier fair share of the profits generated by the concern, but, as George Meaney, first president of the AFL-CIO pointed out, government does not make a profit, so there is no point to having union demands for a greater share of them. The WEA is just a group of shake down artists.

          • fliterman

            Scottthebadger — Well then, BadgerMom obviously never met my family!

            My mother taught in a one room Midwest prairie school, though she was brilliant and could go anywhere and do many things. Later she was recruited to work during the Depression when work was rare, for the government in D.C. in a relatively high level position. She also played violin in the symphony there. In later life as a farm wife occasionally driving a Farmall, she volunteered teaching and was a long time unpaid volunteer librarian.

            If alive, my mother would disgrace you with your asinine, ” ED Degrees are popular because they are not all that hard to get, and many people find that they don’t cut too far into their drinking time.”

            Beyond her, my now retired wife taught seminar level, elementary students, often spending thousands of dollars of her own money annually for her students the school could not provide because of budget cuts. She was up before dark, and returned late near dinnertime. Then she worked on lesson plans for the next day, along with grading papers.

            She spent many weekends and summers working without pay, because she loved her profession. And although now retired, she still spend several days a week (last week 7 days ) with Kiwanis or several local schools, and with child charities all without pay. She is also the only elementary teacher I know whose former elementary students of 15 years ago wanted and did set up a successful, 3rd/4th/5th grade reunion with their old elementary teacher this past summer. She is a well-known and very respected community leader, not even close to the ne’er-do-wel teacher you insultingly stereotype. In fact, she is not all that unique.

            Our son after 10 years working successfully, slightly famously, and financially successful, decided to earn an expensive and time consuming post graduate degree so he could go into education to “give back”. Both in earlier teaching and now in administration, he is making quite a name for himself across school districts. He also works with two former and highly successful corporate attorneys, who like him also ‘sacrificed’ high 6-figure incomes, to do something right for the next generation by choosing to teach high school in a difficult school district. [He being anti union, he and I debate often, albeit always very friendly.]

            And don’t even get me started on how unions have eliminated child labor, sweatshops, mine disasters, improved packing plant safety, and have restrained the robber barons, etc, etc, etc. I’ll save that for next time. Indeed it was actual bloody warfare in the last century between management and labor with many deaths that finally gave labor a tenuous voice. Finally the small guy/good guy labor side, sort of won. But that is now changing. So back to the early 1900s with all its social and class turmoil, if not revolution. Not good.

          • Curtis

            Yeah Flit, that was 19th century. That was a hundred years ago.

            You ever ever ask yourself why they did what they did for the compensation they got and just ask yourself WHY? From this perspective they weren’t doing it for the money and benefits.

            So WHY DID THEY DO IT?

            Why am I paying the San Diego County Librarian $233,000 in retirement alone, not counting dental, medical and whatnot?

            WHY IS THAT FLIT?

            What about San Jose paying their X Police Chief $537,000 IN RETIREMENT ALONE FLIT? Not counting medical and dental? What’s with that Flit?

            Public Unions are a license to steal. Look at San Diego again where the Fire Chief also served as the Union Rep and was granted permission by the board to count his union salary with his county salary for computation of his retirement salary which was double what he made while working.

            Screw that Flit.

            People are starting to learn the dark little secrets of the public unions and the democrat party. They can see the wastelands such as Detroit and St. Louis and New Orleans and even Wisconsin and they’re not laughing at it anymore.

            CA with a $25 BILLION deficit this year. Hmmm. You’d raise taxes. On who? The recently fired and unemployed? What does Pelosi’s SO pay in tax to CA? I’m sure she pays nothing at all. I’ll bet she can see your house though.

          • SCOTTtheBADGER

            You may call it “asinine” all you want, Flit, that does not alter that fact that it is the truth. By the way, unions had absolutely nothing to do with safer food processing. That was the doings of large food processing companies such as Rath, and Armour. They could much more easily afford to institute the cleaner, safer processes, and not only would they then get the USDA “Seal of Approval”, but they could then use that USDA Inspection Seal as a marketing aid, pointing out that the US Gornment approved of THIER methods and products, can the butcher down the street, ( who may not be able to afford to pay for a USDA Inspector on site, no matter how clean his plant ), make that statement? Unions had NOTHING to do with it.

  • Quartermaster

    There’s an old joke in Europe “you can get a great high school education in the US. Only problem is, you have to go to 4 years of college to get it.”

    Even that ended a long time ago. I saw the nonsense when I went back to Engineering School in August of ’90. I have had to correct my grand-daughter several times on econonsense she’s brought home.

    • byrdman

      My neighbor bought a new car to lower her carbon foot print. Her old one was 4 years old, perfect, and paid for. The math just don’t work.

      • Zane

        Yes, but now she’s greener, she boosted GDP and took on more debt for the team! She’s a perfect compulsory schooling graduate!

        • byrdman

          I suppose hope for the media is fully delusional. We swinish multitudes are starting to formulate pointed questions, but the old bromides are within easy reach.

    • Curtis

      I had a friend in high school who was from the Netherlands. He went to school even though it was a complete waste of his time since he would have to make up the year when his family returned to the Netherlands. The Dutch assigned zero credit for schooling in the US.

  • RonF

    If you place cost in the numerator of an equation, and quality in the denominator, you’ll recognize the dual hit.

    Try putting “average yearly income of job the diploma qualifies you for” in the numerator. The extra $3K of tuition a year that the University of Illinois charges for their Engineering school over the other schools there is a bargain.

    • Quartermaster

      At Tennishoe Tech they don’t charge more for Enjineering skool. I imagine the discount in IL is for the much lower quality, but I’d bet they use sell it as a discount. You paiz yer muney and takes yer chanzes.

    • virgil xenophon

      Yes, nothing like walking out w. a degree in “Fine Arts” and a 100 grand bill due..we joke, but except for Med school, this was unheard of in my day…NO ONE, outside of Med students, EVER graduated owing a dime
      (statistically speaking) now huge debts are the norm for undergrads in every major.. Talk about a financial ball & chain!–one of the too little discussed relatively recent societal dysfunctions..

      • fliterman

        I graduated nearly half a century ago with a relatively large student loan debt. After initially sharing my college tuition for a year, my father – although he could well afford it – told me I was suddenly on my own. So I worked construction in the summer, and every part-time job in school that I could. But it was not enough for an expensive college. So I had to go to the bank each year and take out more loans. It took several years to pay them all off.

        But the disparity between minimum wage back then and my college tuition was far less than it is today. I am not sure I could do the same today. Few kids today can “work their way through college” now. And the loan debt is oppressive. Meanwhile the rich get ever richer, while the average guy and middle class have been marginalized despite our advancing economy.

        • Zane

          There was a time when a certain amount of post-graduate debt was a reasonable investment, and enabled a solid return. Unfortunately, that time has long past, and both universities and the USG shamefully exploit young people by encouraging them to sign up for these loans which most cannot benefit from nor ever pay back. As a rule, the USG makes 25% profit from loans that go into default, since nothing–not bankruptcy, nothing–clears those loans, and they can be paid back with money seized from anything, including disability payments. By the time all the late payments and compounded interest is reclaimed from whatever income the sucker had, it’s quite lucrative. It’s a wicked, shameful business.

        • Pixelkiller

          Found this from this morning on Instapundit who is on been on a roll about the Education Bubble”
          HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Just ran across this pithy summary: If you had to sum up the education bubble in one misconception, it might be: “The average 22-year-old is a good credit risk for $150,000 in debt, collateralized by something completely intangible.”

  • Heather

    Yes, to agree with others, this is going on in the elementary/middle/high school level as well. Just last week it was revealed that public schools here in WI are required to teach students about the glorious history of labor unions in WI and the many benefits they have provided to the modern citizen. Sigh.

    Like another poster, we’ve decided, at least for now, to homeschool. This year, my fifth and third graders are studying Ancient civilizations. This is my fifth grader’s second time through the Ancients and my third grader’s first time through. (We follow the Classical Education pattern of year 1- Ancients (pre-history to 400AD); year 2 – Middle Ages & Renaissance (400-1600 AD); Year 3 – Early Modern (1600-1850 AD), and year 4 – Modern History (1850-present). Repeat cycle three times through schooling years.) So far this year, we’ve covered the Egyptians, the Israelites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Chinese, and the Persians. Currently, we’re in Greece. We’ve finished up the Persian and the Peloponnesian Wars, and this week we’re focusing on Alexander the Great. Next week, we’ll be moving on to the founding of Rome. Our local public schools teach little to no history. Up until grade five, public school students don’t even study anything beyond the History of the State of WI!

    My oldest two, 10 and 8, have already read many of the “Great Books”: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, Oliver Twist, and Robinson Crusoe … to name a few. Our ten year old has even branched into: The Lord of the Rings trilogy; the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy; the first four Hornblower books, Watership Down, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, and Ender’s Game.

    My hope is to inoculate them against liberal thinking and to give them a taste for good literature as much as possible before I throw their minds out there for teachers and professors to mold in high school and college.

    • fliterman

      Yikes! With all that classical education, do the kids ever have fun? Play sports?

      The rise, growth, and decline of the labor movement in the US, from before the Civil War to the present day had played a large and important role in the development of our country, and especially in Wisconsin.

      It makes no difference whether you believe it was for better or worse, it happened and was important. Just because you do not like a particular yet important subject should not be reason to censor it.

      BTW, you do realize many of those books were written by liberals, don’t you?

      • Heather

        I think because there is not as much wasted classroom time, we get through desk work much faster than a teacher in a public school dealing with 30 kids. We cover history, math, science, spelling, penmanship, logic, French, Latin, grammar, and Literature from 9-12 in the AM and 1-3 in the PM. The boys have plenty of time to play during the day.

        We’re also super active in our community. They swim, run track, and play tennis, baseball and football. They’re also in Cub Scouts and our oldest participated in FIRST LEGO League last year. :-D

        Politically, I would call myself a classical liberal. I’m not against what I would call pure liberalism, but I disagree with most of the positions the modern Democratic party has taken. I actually loved To Kill a Mockingbird; a book that is the bane of most conservatives. Ha!

        Furthermore, my mother was a negotiator for the AFL-CIO for almost 10 years. I’m not anti-union, per se, I’m against it being presented as the most wonderful thing to happen to Wisconsin especially at the expense of other things not being taught. :-)

    • virgil xenophon

      Heather, probably the SINGLE, FINEST 2 vol set on Hist and Geography
      EVER, was published by V. M. Hillyer, the former HeadMaster of the Calvert School in Baltimore (which has perhaps *THE* FINEST home-schooling program extant–check it out) entitled “A Child’s History of the World” and companion “A Child’s Geography of the World.” You simply MUST GET THEM! Read the reviews on Amazon. I, like one of the reviewers STILL enjoy re-reading them even at age 66. One of the most literate works ever which never talks down to the young reader and is written in an eminently entertaining style.

      PS: And don’t forget to check out Calvert’s Home-schooling aids/program!!

      • Heather

        I’ve heard good things about Hillyer in the past, but never checked him out. I will do now, for sure. Thanks!

    • Zane

      Heather, are you still having to meet state requirements for what your children must “achieve” and be tested for at certain levels? Also, have you thought much about “unschooling?”

      My daughter takes to school like a fish in water, but that’s the self-licking ice-cream cone of the arrangement whereby the students that make the school look good are paraded as its successes and patted on the head. We have been told by schools not to plan vacations during the week that grade level testing would be held. Why? Because she raises the grade curve considerably, making a) the teacher and b) the school look much, much better than either is.

      OTOH, we receive dire warnings that our son, should he not improve in sitting still and parroting his pedagogue, will soon be doomed to a secondary track from which he shall never recover. Previous pedagogues have screwed up his handwriting and his desire to learn in a classroom so badly that he, too, is one of those self-fulfilling prophecies schools thrive on.

      In both cases the schools are using my children for ends that have nothing to do with the best interests of my children. I hate them, passionately, and plan to change things when I retire two years from now.

      • Heather

        The requirements for homeschooling in WI are: “… at least 875 hours of instruction each school year.” in a “sequentially progressive curriculum of fundamental instruction in reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and health.” Testing is not required by law, but we have chosen to test annually with the EXPLORE test through NUMATS beginning in third grade. I am not a fan of unschooling. Sorry! We stick pretty close to recommendations in “The Well-Trained Mind” by Jessi Wise and Susan Wise Bauer.

        We are so grateful that we have the option to homeschool our children. Our oldest is on the gifted end of the spectrum and I am glad that we are able to provide the challenge that would not be there for him in our local elementary school. Our second oldest is on the opposite end of the spectrum. He’s not slow, but he’s what my husband would call spacey. He would have been left behind in a classroom of 30 kids. I am thrilled to report that this child is now working above grade level in math, learning Latin with ease, and reads just for fun for hours on end.

    • SCOTTtheBADGER

      Ah! Watership Down! All us Lendris enjoy that book. Nice to know that there is yet another Badger about Lex’s Place.

      • The guy who wrote Watership Down jumped into Arnhem for Market Garden. No wonder that the theme of the book was, “Humans are dangerous.”

        And, yes, we are.

  • Taxi1

    I didn’t see Atlas Shrugged on the list. :)

  • Heather

    BTW, I love Rand’s ideas, but, honestly, can’t stand her writing. I think Atlas Shrugged is an important work because of it’s ideas and want the boys to cover it, but her works are definitely not in my top ten.

  • BN

    Mark Twain is a good read, especially when you move beyond the Sawyer, Finn duo.
    Too bad the public elementary schools skip history, but if it’s like my wife’s school – no time in their extremely structured regimen. Gotta make sure those test scores go up and teachers are forced to follow the script and skip things like art.

  • Mike M.

    Seems to me that for college kids, Thucydides would be MOST appropriate.

  • flatlander

    +1, Thucydides, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. They could do worse than reading Kaplan’s “Warrior Politics” as an orientation.

  • Mike M.

    Clausewitz for the high school students. Books 1,2, and maybe 8. The rest are of academic interest only (Clausewitz started writing the Napoleonic Staff Officer’s Manual, got to War Plans, and had a brainstorm).

    • GeoSTI

      A true doorstopper, even in its “nowhere near complete” status.

      I wonder what would have happened if Clausewitz had another 20 years of life.

      • Mike M.

        I think he would have split the book. One volume would have been a staff manual, the other a tome on strategy.

  • Grandpa Bluewater

    Ahem, now for a ray of sunshine. I know a solution.

    NROTC Scholarship. All tuition, all books, all fees and and monthly stipend. 3 summer internships with pay (modest). A JOB WHEN YOU GRADUATE. Multiple preparation options for a post Navy civilian career starting after six years experience with true adult responsibilities almost immediately after graduation. Numerous quality Universities have openings.

    Check it out.

  • Wotthehell is wrong with reading mathematics, physics, philosophy and Latin Classics?

    As Eric Cartman would say, “HIPPEHS!”

  • fliterman

    Curtis – My son’s father once killed a confirmed 112 enemy before lunch. He singularly put their blood, body parts, and uniforms hanging from the trees. But that was only one quick morning of too many, within a misplaced, political, and furtive effort.

    If my son – albeit capable of many other careers – encourages or saves one of his high school students to excel, and facilitates only one student to a better and more productive life that would otherwise not be likely, he will accomplish far more than his father did under withering enemy fire killing innumerable VC, NVA, and probably Vietnamese civilians North and South, and forever hopefully, not any friendly fire casualties.

    He is as dedicated as I was. But his efforts I suspect will reap much better results than mine.

  • Curtis

    Well Flit, you prove true to your metal once again.

    You failed to answer even one question. Sometimes you are pathetic.

    Those were ‘why’ questions. You have gratis to ask me any ‘why’ question. I am my father’s son and you can read about him in S.L.A Marshall’s Battles in the Monsoon or Hackworth’s “About Face”. The old man was Field Artillery in the Central Highlands. I dare say he knew a thing or two about killing. Nothing like the poor wretches in the 8th AF.

    You instantly dart off in misdirection which appears to be your stock in trade.

    This was your most pathetic response. My boy is a good boy and you losers must pay him 200% more salary than you’ll ever see and lifetime medical and dental for the rest of his life because he volunteered to teach.

    Just sickening.

eXTReMe Tracker

View My Stats