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I mean, this woman chose her first of five colleges based primarily on how much sunshine it would get and how cool it would sound to tell people she was going to college there. Hawaii, man!! HAWAII!! I'm goin' to college in HAWAII!!...then she discovered it rained nonstop and was not the vacation paradise she and her pal were looking for when they paged through the catalogs. She pinballed around from campus to campus for a large part of the rest of her career.
I'm not going to knock her choice of major--I chose the same--nor the reasons, which at that time were the same for me as for her (as a poor kid, I did need to think of my education in terms of how marketable it would make me). But if she wanted a serious, challenging journalism degree, she could have gotten it from one of the top j-schools--if she could have gotten in. I doubt she could have. And I can testify, by the time she came along (I'm a few years older), j-schools were realizing they weren't really doing much of a service if they only graduated people capable of writing a story but with no knowledge of the stuff they wrote ABOUT. They were either encouraging dual majors--journalism and history, journalism and poli sci, journalism and science, pretty much anything but journalism and English--or making their majors take mostly core courses for two years and not allowing them to get into the meat of their major until they were juniors. Sarah Palin strikes me as someone who didn't learn much about science, math, history, economics, political science or even English--her main goal was to get her pretty face on TV (and entering pageants was a means to that end too--many a female j-schooler with looks has beauty-pageanted her way to a broadcast career). She managed to scrape by well enough to get a degree, but that doesn't have to mean anything.
She reminds me of this: Right before I finished my bachelor's, I was called upon by one of my toughest profs and asked to serve as a tutor for a visual communications major. He had a problem--we were all required to pass a test in grammar and composition or we couldn't get our degree. His skills were purely visual, and he was clueless at things concerning writing, but he too had to pass this test or else. My mission was to help him cram just enough knowledge to pass. (And it was a crucial mission; he had the same name as a building on campus, if you get my drift.) It was a tough job, but in the end, I was informed, he managed to score just 1 point shy of a passing grade. The prof spotted him the point, just to get him the hell out of there and please his family.
When I think of Sarah Palin, I think of him. Of course, for all I know he could have been brilliant in other areas, but man, was he hard to teach basic English, and especially hard for me because I came by my skills naturally and by reading a lot, and didn't necessarily know how how to teach him "the rules." But his example reminds me that not everyone who manages to come out of college with a degree is smart or even absorbs what he or she sits in a classroom learning for all those years. They manage to regurgitate enough to get by on multiple-choice tests, and when faced with essay exams that force them to write at length, they fill the pages with big writing and lots of words that add up to nothing: "The War of 1812 was a highly significant event in American history, one that is remembered to this day. Its importance to the future of America cannot be minimized..." Yes, dear, but WHAT HAPPENED? WHO was fighting? Why? When did it happen? ("Um, 1812?") Etc., etc.
There was a time when I worried about what kind of candidate Sarah Palin might make herself by 2012 with more time and tutoring than she obviously had time for this go-'round. With her obvious appeal to certain types, it seemed to me that all she needed to do was spend more time boning up on basic facts and she might actually be a threat in four years. But now, I don't worry so much. Ignorance and incuriosity combined with hubris--ambition disconnected from any actual willingness to work hard--tends to add up to MAJOR FAIL.
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