The Campaign Continues . . .

Oh, is the Republican presidential nomination campaign still on?

This protracted race is probably the best argument for replacing the constitutional system in America with a parliamentary system that guarantees shorter election campaigns - or at least overturning Citizens United. All eyes are on tomorrow's Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, especially Ohio, where Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are in a dead heat. Santorum was a huge favorite in Ohio until he said John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on separation of church and state made him want to throw up and suggested that a President who wanted people to go to college was a snob.

Yeah, about that latter issue . . .. Santorum apparently misunderstood President Obama's comments on education. Obama believes that anyone who may not be an appropriate fit for college ought to go to a trade school, which, ironically, was the same point Santorum was trying to make in his wrongly worded remarks. And that would be a reasonable argument, which Santorum could have made if he had spent time in his own undergraduate studies learning how to debate.

But - and here's another important point no one seems to be making - wouldn't it be a good idea if some trade school students went to college as well, if they have the intellectual capability for it, so they could enjoy high art and literature in addition to learning how to work in a specific vocation? And it would also be beneficial to require some intellectual rigor in the engineers who build our dams and bridges so they could have minds flexible enough to consider possible effects of their work and imagine the implications of it. If engineers are smart enough to ponder the long-term effect of infrastructural systems and how they could fail, for example, they can design infrastructure with such ramifications in mind. Then we could build bridges that don't collapse.

As someone who merely observes the debate over education in America and is not an expert on it, I don't know how we can get the best bang for a buck and produce, as former Vice President Dan Quayle advocated, "the best educated American people in the world." All I know is that the current system ain't working. Look at Dan Quayle.