What Nemo Said

“I don’t know how all this talk about truth, goodness, and beauty are going to get a kid into college.”

I heard somewhere that a board member of a Christian classical school uttered these words. I chooose to regard them as apocryphal and thus to set them up as a dummy to respond to.

Here’s my first response:

30% of adults in the US have a college education, while only 20% of our jobs require one. College is an increasingly good way to collect debt and prepare for unemployment.

But so what. Here’s my second, cheeky response (I don’t mind being cheeky because nobody ever would really have said that anyway):

How, if you minimize truth, goodness, and beauty, will a student enter the kingdom of God? And besides, without truth, goodness, and beauty, and the ability to perceive and communicate them, what good could college possibly do? It might even lead people to say things like what you (who don’t exist, of course) said.