Education Today: A View From the Right

Here is a sample of opinions from Phyllis Schafly on education in the United States today.

College Isn't Necessary for many Careers

The flight overseas includes professional as well as low-wage jobs, with engineering jobs offshored to India and China. Thousands of bright Asian engineers are willing to work for a fraction of American wages, which is why Boeing just signed a 10-year, $1-billion-a-year deal with an Indian government-run company.

But it doesn't make sense for parents to mortgage their homes, or for students to saddle themselves with long-term debt, in order to pay overpriced college tuition to prepare for jobs that no longer exist. Tuition at public universities has risen an unprecedented 51 percent over the past five years.

Don't Major in English

When the classics are assigned, they are victims of the academic fad called deconstructionism. That means: pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called "Shakespearean Sexuality," or "Chaucer: Gender and Genre" at Hamilton College.

ACTA says "a degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. It is tantamount to fraud." College students: don't waste your scarce college dollars on a major in English.

Advice for Education Secretary Spellings

"The dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students approaches 50 percent. . . . Every year nearly a million kids fail to graduate high school. . . . The United States has the most severe income gap between high school graduates and dropouts in the world."

In her speech, Secretary Spellings coined an apt phrase and also borrowed a pertinent phrase from the immigration debate to describe urban public schools. She called them "dropout factories" and decried the fact that they have been "in the shadows for so long."