These ideas – a cancel culture, safe spaces, and trigger warnings – are antithetical to education. A truly educated person is open-minded, not afraid of being challenged, and perhaps most importantly capable of changing her mind and willing to do so in light of facts and reason. An educated person doesn’t burn books or tear down statues; in fact, they do the very opposite.
Politicians are good at identifying symptoms that bother us – these are the building blocks of campaigns. Symptoms are easy to identify. It is also easy to identify ways of masking those symptoms, and it is a lot easier to mask them than to fix the problem. The student loan crisis is a great example. The political solution is to forgive the debt; but the problem is not the debt, it’s the cost of education.
