Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Does It Make Me a Liberal....

...if I agree with Camille Paglia?

As I have argued for years, we desperately need a return to vocational training. The virtually universal conversion of American high schools to a pre-college track over the past half-century has watered down the curriculum to its present deadening uselessness. Lower-middle-class and working-class families who pay taxes have a right to expect that primary schools will prepare their children for a productive life.

My platform calls for a revalorization of the trades (which are related by craftsmanship to the art schools where I have taught for most of my career). Upper-middle-class families should be ready to support their children's unorthodox choice for a career in carpentry, masonry or landscaping. We need to strip the elite aura from the claustrophobic "prestige" jobs in sterile corporate offices, where high salaries drug the worker clones from recognition of their own imprisonment and castration.

(You will find this on page two of the linked article.)

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