The discover what being a member of the “educated elite” means we must consider a combination of income and education. Before doing this, we should understand the definition of “elite”—
1. a group or class of persons or a member of such a group or class, enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status
2. the most powerful, rich, gifted, or educated members of a group, community, etc
3. a group or class of persons enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status
There is no way that students in the Part 1 video, that have not completed college or might never graduate, belong to the “educated elite”.
If you click on this link at Wikipedia, you will discover that the “educated elite” are those that graduated from college with at least a BA and are earning at or above the medium for their educational level.
The higher the earnings linked to education, the higher the elite status. The median household income in the US is $45,016 annually while households with less than a 9th grade education earn less than $19,000 compared to the median income of a Bachelor’s degree at $68,728 climbing to $100,000 annually for a household income from Professional degrees, which represents the real “educated elite”.
Since we have no way of knowing that any of those people on that video filmed at CSU Fresno (in Part 1) belong to the real “educated elite”, it is wrong to infer colleges are not doing their job.
At first I thought I wouldn’t have signed the ban. Now that I’ve had a few hours to think, I changed my mind and would sign knowing that due to the Constitution and the guarantee of free speech in America that Limbaugh and Beck would not be banned as they might be in Cuba, the USSR or China.
The reason I’d sign is a way to protest how these two and others like them have taken advantage of free speech in the US to twist the facts to deceive the uneducated or the functional illiterate. which is a much larger number than the “educated elite”.
Functional illiteracy in the United States is growing at a rate of over 2 million new inductees per year into its ranks… Statistics show that functional illiterates in this country:
- Constitute 70% of the prisoners in state and federal prisons
- That 85% of juvenile offenders are classified as functionally or marginally illiterate
- That 43% of those with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty
- Over 42 million American adults can’t read
- Another 50 million read at fourth or fifth grade levels
- The total number of functionally illiterate adults increases by approximately 2.25 million persons every single year
My “old” conservative friend inferred that the people signing that ban we see in the Part 1 video were examples of America’s “educated elite”. Really? That’s quite a stretch after considering all the facts. One fact for sure, although Rush Limbaugh earns much more than most of the educated elite, he doesn’t belong to that group since he never graduated from college.
Return to Debating about the “Educated Elite” – Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 