I have to say that sometimes market-obsessed conservatives fascinate me with their strange subtleties. Here’s Neal McCluskey, writing recently in Forbes (“SRFA Stinks“) about the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA). “SAFRA would direct $47 billion to Pell grants and require that grant amounts rise annually at the rate of inflation-plus-one-point,” Mc Cluskey notes.

“SAFRA would send about $9.5 billion to community colleges; $2.5 billion would go toward improving facilities,” he says, “and the remainder toward grants intended to push schools to improve their program-completion and job-placement rates.” And “$8 billion is slated to go to early-childhood education and $4 billion to repairing and modernizing not just public college buildings, but elementary and secondary schools as well.”…

Perhaps they, the youngest generation, can labor with their teachers in putting together the house that has forfeited its sense of order. If they do, they can graduate with the knowledge that they possess something: a fundamental awareness of how a certain powerful literature was created over time, how its parts fit together, and how the process of creation has been renewed and changed through the centuries …

They can also convert what many of them now consider a liability and a second-rate activity into a sizable asset. They can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of…