Brooks on Marx

For much of the op-ed, I agreed with the sentiments. Which were Brooks' interpretation of what Karl Marx would say now. But then there was this one little line:

They send their children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of privilege for the children of the professional class, where they are given the social and other skills to extend class hegemony.

These are three very different types of universities. UPenn is private, exclusionary by nature. UW and Cal-Berkeley are public and inclusionary by nature. I do not know what Berkeley's cutoff is, but I do know what UW's cutoff is. If you are a resident of WI or MN, and graduated in the top 50% of your class, you were in. Whether or not you survived your first year is another matter. Many students from the smaller towns opted for one of the many other colleges / universities in the system and then transferred after they were more familiar / comfortable with the large size. It didn't cost a lot. It was easily covered with summer and part time jobs. I think for in-state, the tuition was $5,000 per year. Not exactly an exorbitant amount.

The end of the article also annoyed me, as it implied that its the rise of single parent households that cause the separation between educated and uneducated. Yes, there are more single parent households, but that's because its now OK to be single. One of the rare single parent households in the 50s raised my mother. Another in the 20s raised my grandmother. One became a college professor, and the other a principal. Neither my grandmother nor my great-grandmother felt the need to be married to raise their child. I bet that while the percentage of single parent households in the lower third increased, it also increased in the other two-thirds.

The article also lambasts children who are adopted (another of my grandparents, several of my cousins) as not being likely to graduate high school. It doesn't take into effect that while the rich can find ways out of pregnancy (birth control, abortion, adoption), the right wing, particularly the theological wing, is making sure that the poor cannot use those options.