A generation ago many colleges had General Knowledge Tests, conducted when students came in and in their last year. When the latter test was taken, the person had been literate for four more years of a 22-year lifetime, so the 22-year-olds had more general knowledge than they had when they entered.

This was used as proof that Education Pays. But someone who had been out working for four years would have had more knowledge of the world in general after four years, too.

No matter what a group of people do for four years, a major portion of their literate lifetime at that age, they will know more at 22 than they did at 18.

Well, almost.

There WAS one exception to the rule. Those who had gotten an Education degree had LESS general knowledge than they did as freshmen. This didn’t really surprise anybody or impress anybody, least of all those who RAN the Schools of Education.

As you are no doubt aware, to be a teacher you need lots of courses in Education and a very few courses in whatever it is you teach.

This is the degree Bill O’Reilly has. What he says is not the liberal line, but it does sound like a grammar school teacher. He repeats ALL the lines perfectly. He will say that nothing is a problem of intelligence, it is all a matter of Bad Upbringing.

All anybody needs is Education. Once O’Reilly said, “Are you going to say that some kids are just naturally SMARTER than others? That’s absurd.”

O’Reilly’s “wisdom” is so hackneyed it isn’t him who worries me, it is his audience. But he has had the top Cable Network program for years and he deserves it. When a moron is the smartest man in the room, you really need to take a look at that room.

O’Reilly has some consistency and he takes on silly people directly. He is consistent in his Old Fashioned, Family Values, Party-Line position.

O’Reilly is such an enemy of some silliness that people don’t even notice his own. But without his own, he wouldn’t be ALLOWED on television. He represents the Old nonsense, which is less mindless than the New nonsense.

If you look at the room he is in, he really is the smartest kid there.

O’Reilly also takes feedback. I don’t mean just that he GETS feedback, but he pays attention to it. I stopped watching him regularly after he had a special on how some Georgia high school students had DARED to have a PRIVATE high school prom to which blacks were not invited.

You have to understand respectables to see why he came on so strong on this. For a respectable, there is a Glory and a Free Set of Brownie Points with the media if you denounce any form of “white racism.” So he came on the same way he would have if some terrorists had done a mass shooting.

The next day you could tell he was stunned. He hasn’t done that since. The comedian Miller started out for a cheap shot at segregationists a few days back, and O’Reilly cut him off.

I remember Ally Mac Beal was getting ready to have the standard black boyfriend show and the grassroots protest stopped it before it got all the way.

But, as I say, O’Reilly actually READS a lot of his feedback.

When you spend your entire working life among people who say “racism” is worse than terrorism, you learn to ignore any comment from anyone YOU DEFINE as a racist. So this kind of reaction comes as a total shock,

I remember reading a story about a little kid who came home from his first day of school proud as punch. He told his mother that his class was divided into the smarter kids, Table A, the regular kids, Table B, and the Dumb Table.

He announced proudly, “I’m the smartest one at the Dumb Table!”

Well, I guess Bill does have SOMETHING to be proud of.