Aquinas | Antonius Aquinas

The inevitable collapse of the student loan “market” and with it the takedown of many higher educational institutions will be one of the happiest and much needed events to look forward to in the coming months/years. Whether the student loan bubble bursts on its own or implodes due to a general economic collapse, does not matter as long as higher education is dealt a death blow and can no longer be a conduit of socialist and egalitarian nonsense for the inculcation of young minds.

The perilous condition of the student loan sector can be seen by looking at a few ominous pieces of data:

The US has around $1.3 trillion in non dischargeable loans to students
Over 120 billion in student loans are already in default
27% of students are a month behind on their payments*

As economic conditions deteriorate and there are even less meaningful jobs for college graduates than there are now, these numbers will only get worse.

Not only have colleges and universities been havens of leftist thought for many years, but they have become ridiculously expensive and beyond the reach of most middle-class income earners to afford without going into significant debt. Moreover, the incessant barrage by the Establishment about the necessity of a college degree has distorted the labor market to where worthless, debt-ridden degrees are pursued instead of much needed blue-collar employment. The readjustment of the labor market to a proper balance will not only take time, but it will be a costly, painful process.

While the “hard” sciences have not been as effected by the Left, the social sciences have long been an intellectual wasteland devoid of any freedom of thought or opinion. Promotion and recognition of academic excellence is, more often than not, based on diversity and one’s skin color not merit. Arguably, economic science has been the most corrupted discipline. Economics departments of major universities are now training grounds for employment in state and federal bureaucracies, the banking industry, and Federal Reserve where Marxism, Keynesianism, neo-Keynesianism or whatever kooky, nonsensical theory of the day can be put into practice.

While higher education has long been hostile to the ideals of Western Civilization, it is now explicitly a bastion of anti-white discrimination and hostility especially against white heterosexual men. Few days now pass where there is not an incident, many of which are approved by school authorities, blatantly attacking white Americans or symbols that supposedly represent them.

Of course, the higher education apparatchiks have had an easy time in their brainwashing task since the impressionable minds in their charge have been indoctrinated by twelve years of public “schooling.” Not only has the public school been a mechanism of social engineering, but it has constantly pushed its chattel to continue their “education” at the collegiate level.

The Trump Administration and most on the Right have failed to grasp the liberalistic bias of American education. Education Department Secretary Betsy DeVos has spoken about “competition” via school choice, vouchers, magnet and charter schools to increase school and student performance. The Administration’s proposed 2018 education budget calls for an increase in federal spending on school choice by $1.4 billion, a $168 million increase for charter schools, and a $1 billion increase for Title I “to encourage school districts to adopt a system of student-based budgeting and open enrollment that enables Federal, State, and local funding to follow a student to the public school of his or her choice.”**

These shopworn ideas and policies are not only fundamentally flawed and will make matters worse, but they will do nothing to counteract and or end the Left’s domination of education. Instead, President Trump should do what he spoke of at times on the campaign trail and what President Reagan promised to do, but never did – abolish the Department of Education!

While the collapse of the student loan bubble may be the catalyst for a general financial downturn and will certainly be the cause of tremendous social pain and dislocation, it will, nevertheless, be a necessary prerequisite if America and, for that matter, the Western world is to ever break the grip of leftist ideology which rules it. May the bursting of the student loan bubble commence!

*Tyler Durden, ‘”Staggering’ Student Loan Defaults On Deck: 27% Of Students Are A Month Behind On Their Payments.” Zero Hedge. 15 April 2017. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-15/staggering-student-loan-defaults-deck-27-students-are-month-behind-their-payments

**Jade Scipioni, “Why Betsy DeVos Is Visiting This Ohio School Today.” Fox Business. 20 April 2017. http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/04/20/why-betsy-devos-is-visiting-this-ohio-school-today.html

Antonius Aquinas@AntoniusAquinas

https://antoniusaquinas.com

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March 7th is the traditional feast day of one of the most important thinkers of Western Civilization, the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1275). Despite being referred to early in life as a “Dumb Ox,” St. Thomas would, nevertheless, profoundly shape the development of Western theology and philosophy.

St. Thomas was instrumental for the reintroduction of Aristotle into Western thought and synthesized Greco-Roman natural law constructs with Christian Revelation to produce the mighty system which became known as “Thomism.” The eminent saint’s importance in this regard cannot be understated as the late Murray Rothbard so aptly describes: “For in reviving and building on Aristotle, St. Thomas introduced and established in the Christian world a philosophy of natural law, a philosophy, in which human reason is able to master the basic truths of the universe. In the hands of Aquinas as in Aristotle, philosophy, with reason as its instrument of knowledge, became once again the queen of the sciences.”*

A prolific and multidimensional writer, St. Thomas’ best-known work was the Summa Theologiae which has been called by one commentator “the fullest exposition of theological teaching ever given to the world.”** He was also an accomplished poet whose hymns such as Lauda Sion and the Adoro Te Devote are some of the most sublime in all of Christian tradition. Legend has it that Pope Urban IV commissioned the Angelic Doctor and St. Bonaventure to compose hymns for the Feast of Corpus Christi. St. Bonaventure, after hearing St. Thomas’ compositions, was so overwhelmed with their splendor that he promptly burned his own.

Sainthood, however, requires more than a brilliant mind and facile pen, and by all accounts St. Thomas led a holy and virtuous life and despite his intellectual prowess remained the humblest of men. Near the conclusion of his life, he received a private revelation which changed him to such a degree that he could no longer engage in scholarly endeavors. He reportedly said, “The end of my labors is come. All that I have written appears to me as so much straw, after the things that have been revealed to me. I hope in the mercy of God that the end of my life may soon follow the end of my labors.***

A characteristic of nearly all seminal thinkers is that history would have been considerably different if they had not lived. This is undeniable in the case of St. Thomas. One of his 20th-century biographers, G.K. Chesterton, summarized the saint’s role in Western intellectual development in this manner: “. . . St. Thomas was one of the great liberators of the human intellect. . . . [He] was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it toward experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that reason had a divine right to feed upon fact, and that it was the business of the faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies.”****

Saint, confessor, theologian, philosopher, mystic, poet, the Angelic Doctor’s works were the summit of the often and wrongly maligned Medieval Era and until St. Thomas is returned to his exalted status, Western Civilization will continue its tragic decline.

*Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume 1 (Brookfield, VT.: Edward Elgar Publishing Company, 1995), p. 57.

**Herbart J. Thurston and Donald Attwater, eds., Butler’s Lives of the Saints, rev. edition (Allen, Texas: Christian Classics, 1996), vol. 1, p. 512.

***Dominican Saints of the Rosary Series, St. Thomas Aquinas: Universal Doctor of the Church (Rockford, Ill.: TAN Books and Publishers, inc., 1995), p. 30.

****G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: image books Doubleday, 1956), pp. 32-33.

Antonius Aquinas@AntoniusAquinas