We should ALL support free college, because a college education should be an EDUCATION.

[Ken Burch]

14. I wasn't attacking people who don't go to college by choice and you know it.

There was nothing in my OP that came anywhere close to disparaging people who have been denied a real education, either.

I was talking about a twisted corporate-controlled educational system.

I want everyone who wants it to actually have the experience of exposure to real ideas, real discussion, a chance to stretch their minds to the fullest. Don't you?

I want anyone who wishes to, at any stage of her or his life, to be able to enrich their minds and their spirits, including farmers, bricklayers, WalMart clerks and the poor bastard who's going to spend his life chained to the fry machine at McDonald's.

There was no reason at all for you to interpret my OP as saying people who don't wish to go to college are soulless or hollow at all, and I have no idea how you even got there from what I wrote.

Actual elitism would be to say that the current university model, which can best be described as "job school for the 1%" is te best of all possible worlds.

And what made you hate the liberal arts in the Seventies and Eighties? The fact that the voices from below began to be heard? That the myth that this country's history was two centuries of moral perfection was being challenged? That writers from places other than 19th Century Britain and Europe were finally acknowledged to have produced works of literary value?

What did the liberal arts ever do to you?

And why would a Coltrane fan ever be a cultural conservative? Someone like Trane would want everyone to be able to learn whatever they want to learn, at the lowest possible monetary cost.