As Silence Dogood, Benjamin Franklin wrote about many of his peers who got sent off to Harvard, whereas his father did not put up the money for him to go.  When I read this passage below, I couldn’t help thinking about Barack Obama and people like him who got to waltz through life in a time of affirmative action.  The last sentence is so perfectly reflective of people like him.

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Silence was particularly fond of ridiculing Harvard. She complained that it had been ruined by corruption and elitism, and that most of its students learned nothing there except how to be conceited:

“I reflected in my Mind on the extream Folly of those Parents, who, blind to their Childrens Dulness, and insensible of the Solidity of their Skulls, because they think their Purses can afford it, will needs send them to the Temple of Learning, where, for want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquir’d at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.”