Oh good, I get to make one of my favorite lectures.
In the crew room of one of the clubs I work at (the extremely famous and legendary one) someone wrote on the wall: You don't get trained here, you get here trained. Most shows we use five people, between us, we have about 150 years of experience doing live music shows. There is not a single person that you can't tell to do something that they can't do - that they haven't done thousands of times. I work at (and have worked at) a lot of places that were not like that, that did not have that level of training and experience, and it makes a huge difference. Why should I expect less out of people who want to be President of the United States - easily, one of the most powerful jobs in the world - then I do out of stagehands?
Because, what that experience has taught me (among other things) is that:
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
So a little real world experience ain't a bad deal, in reality.
As for the Ivy League (and bunch of other places too besides the seven brothers and the seven sisters) education. OK, its not a deal maker, or breaker for me. But, it does say something. I've been to both public and private colleges, taught at HUGE public universities, private colleges and Community Colleges (as well as AP high school classes) and there is a difference. The best courses I ever taught were the ROTC classes in military history. Because . . . I had the best students in them. Smart, dedicated, motivated - I could not pitch anything over their heads, because there was very little that was over their heads. The better - more prepared, more well studied - the students were, the better I could be. And the people I know who went to major schools, Stanford, Harvard (the Stanford of the East), Auburn, Georgetown, Notre Dame and all that are - if not the smartest people I know - the best at applying everything they can summon to getting the job done.
Granted even a crappy student can get a third rate education at Yale, we've just lived though eight years of that. But a really good student is going to be challenged at a major uni far more than they would be at the local community college, bet on it. Auburn on the whole has better students and better professors than Itta Bena does. (Even though my favorite wide receiver in the history of football came from Itta Bena). Or maybe that is the point. Really great schools have crappy sports - Catholic Universities excepted - and some of the best, like University of Chicago, don't even have a sports program at all, they do Nobel Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners instead. And I'm no doubt wrong about Itta Bena, I'm sure the predominantly African-American student population there worked very hard to be there, and even harder to get out - I should have said, Yazoo Community College.
And, (and this is very key) five colleges in six years (aside from showing that one can't really commit and/or finish anything) also robs the student of any real chance at education they might have had. My reward for being picked on by the other students in grade and high school was to be picked on by the professors in college. They - like I did when I taught - sought out the best students, and made them do more, work harder, learn more and really work to expand themselves. When I taught students would get some sort of general writing assignment. The ones I really liked, I gave special topics to. Ones that were harder, more difficult, and often from the opposite perspective they were comfortable with. I made them reach, like my best professors did to me. I'm sure Obama got that treatment all the way though, I'm just as sure Palin never did.
If you think it does not make a difference, then you don't know what it is you're talking about.
