I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: A bill before the California legislature to address soaring student loan debt would require high school students to take a personal finance class.
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Teaching personal finance to students might be construed as serious a crime against the state as teaching, in a civics class, that the Constitution is a dead letter.
Truth loses out, indoctrination over education.
Yes, because student loan debt is the result of students exercising their power irresponsibly — that power being “choosing to go to college in the first fucking place” since crippling debt is the sine qua non of the modern college experience.
If their heads weren’t up their own asses, the leg. would require students to take a ruthlessly honest political science course that explains the hold our wealthy, criminal, illegal aristocracy has on government and, as such, notes that financial and educational success depends on combating these courtiers, and maybe then student assistance programs wouldn’t get shafted. Then again, that’s not in the leg.’s best interest, so maybe they don’t have their heads up their asses after all.
Nah, they do.
I recently had the opportunity/misfortune to listen to a group of three young women talking about “serious” issues. They mentioned that in China a couple can only have one baby and if it’s a female it’s aborted, that in the fur industry the animal is skinned alive, from which the conversation started in on slaughterhouses. At that point, someone else on the bus said that the conversation was really inappropriate.
If the teaching materials for such a class as Sekmet mentions were to ever be actually put together, and if it were actually ever taught, the whole “I think this is inappropriate” movement would come down on it like a bag of hammers.
We mock Barbara Bush, openly and with great ferocity, when she says about the war in Iraq: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
But a whole lot of people do the same thing every single day. The desire to think about the heavy stuff, to really expend some time and effort on issues, is a rarity because such thinking takes a long, long time to lead to any answers. And those answers are almost universally indicative that we have, every single one of us, been lied to — often and with great conviction — by the parents, neighbors, bosses, uncles, aunts, and grandparents who raised us.
Who in their right mind would want to live in that world? It’s a bitter, scary place. Far better to just stick your fingers in your ears and go “la la la, I can’t hear you” and, when someone does start to strain against the simplistic, moronic pap, invoke your universal, God-given right to go through life without ever being made uncomfortable in any way. Have a $5 latte at Starbucks, made by someone who pulls in minimum wage and doesn’t dare look displeased.