No, protestors, you are not entitled to free education

By Simon Black

Bleary-eyed from the 16+ hour flight from Asia, I checked my phone last night once the plane landed to find that riots have broken out across the Land of the Free.

It was enough to wake me from my jet lag.

All the televisions in the airport terminal were showing footage of the chaos along with occasional interviews with some of the protestors.

Naturally there was outcry against racism, sexism, violence, and all the usual anti-Trump arguments.

(Which I found ironic given this video of a Trump voter being viciously beaten in Chicago.)

But one of the recurring themes from these protestors being interviewed, primarily young people, was that Trump wasn’t going to do anything about student debt.

This was a major issue during the election, one that Bernie Sanders grabbed onto with promises of free education and debt reduction.

His message resonated with young people.

I’ve see this same theme all over the world, from Chile to the United Kingdom– students want free education, underpinned by a fundamental belief that quality education is a basic human right to be provided by the government.

Even if you agree with this assertion, there’s a MAJOR problem with the logic: these students are conflating “education” with “university degree.”

Anytime young people tell me they’re entitled to free education, I always ask the same questions–

How many books did you read in the past six months?

How many times did you go to the local library?

How many free online courses from top universities like Harvard, MIT, and Georgetown did you take at edx.org?

How often have you actually used the multitude of free resources at your disposal to educate yourself?

Most times I just get the deer in the headlights look.

The truth is that they’re not interested in free education.

They just want a free university degree… a piece of paper that confers neither education nor any guarantee of success in life.

Candidly, many of the important things we need to learn in life are not taught in school.

I’ve started more businesses than I can count, some of them spectacular failures, others highly successful. I didn’t learn any of those skills at school.

And everything I learned about farming, for example, was on the land, not in the classroom.

This is true with many other elements that help us achieve success in life– business, investing, networking, romance, personal health, etc.

Understandably, certain professions do require formal schooling.

But that’s not really the point.

This is ultimately about people expecting the government to steal from others and give them something of questionable value for free when they haven’t yet taken steps to provide for themselves.

Read the rest of the article on Sovereign Man here.