Jim Hopkins: You don't need to watch the box to be an idiot

At last! Something to cheer about. Some news to raise our spirits and pierce the miasma of angst and abjectivity through which we have groped this last little while.

And it's not the footy, either. Sure, it's good to see Sir Clive's saggy, baggy Loins get a sound thrashing. But such pleasure cannot last. It is, by definition, a momentary distraction; a glucose rush, a passing delirium doomed to fade.

Not so this week's heartening revelation. This is a tonic we can savour for a long time.

It may seem extravagant to suggest it might be the salvation of the nation, yet ponder this. If it is true, as the headline on the front page of Tuesday's Harold so boldly asserted, that "TV cuts chances of getting a degree" then it is just possible we've found the answer to our woes.

See, it turns out, according to chaps who've studied the plasmasphere closely, that you can spare your offspring the whole ghastly horror of university simply by letting them spend an extra 51 minutes a day staring at the box.

Here's why. If your slack-jawed urchins are gawping at the screen for 2.76 hours a day then you'd best cancel the extra NCEA maths tutoring and throw away that phrase book you got to decipher the English exam. They're a waste of time: 2.76 hours a day and your sprogs will be leaving school with no qualifications at all. End of story.

But if they watch only 1.9 hours a day (a mere 51 minutes less) they'll be staggering out of the Waikato Law School or some equally execrable institution with their very own degree, for pity's sake.

No decent parent would inflict such a fate on their child. They'd rather stock up on batteries quick smart to ensure the remote never died. They'd rather have prizes for the kids who watch Shortland Street the longest or can answer 20 questions about NZ Idol. In short, they'd do whatever was necessary to keep the nightmare at bay.

University is no place for impressionable young minds easily influenced by entrenched academic dogma. Far better to shield them from such clear and present dangers.

Not least because they'd avoid the indignity of joining that incessant, whingeing chorus of temporary radicals bellyaching about student loans. You don't need to be a lecturer in post-modern ethics to realise it can't be good for the young to engage in such odious elitism.

Essentially, students resent having to spend money to make money. Well, 'twas ever thus, spotty Ecstacists!! Get over it.

You don't hear the Young Slum Landlord of the Year wailing about the crippling burden of mortgage finance, or that fresh-faced airline pilot in the corner bemoaning the cost of the commercial pilot's licence that allows them to sit up front in a 747 and stare at the instruments which are flying the plane.

No, by George, you don't! They just get on with it.

Unlike this wittering army of would-be lawyers, accountants, urban design consultants, policy analysts, political scientists and climate change action advocates who apparently believe they're entitled to get their extravagant hourly rates for nothing.

Well, it's nonsense. Self-serving, arrogant nonsense. And certainly not the start in life any responsible parent would want for their child.

Especially since it also means they're exposed to the dangerous influence of academics, who seem to have their fingers deep in every unpalatable pie we're struggling to digest.

Indeed, you could argue that the more influence such folk have, the bigger the shambles for the rest of us.

Let's face it, there'd be more Masters of Public Mobility and Transport Infrastructure at Transit New Zealand than you could shake a stick at. Trouble is, you can't because you're stuck in a traffic jam five miles away.

And the Aotea Centre wasn't designed by monkeys randomly scribbling on pieces of paper. No, it was degrees did that, old son! Plus the sum of the square of the very same name. Years of the finest study that money could buy gave us that urban masterpiece.

Just as years of study have given us other complex matters like the Treaty. It's academics who've promoted the notion that "culture" and race are more central than citizenship. Little wonder that, eventually, a few ordinary coves start taking them seriously and we end up with a pleasantly deluded 69-year-old boldly appointing herself Prime Minister of Cuckooland and sending her bogus bobbies out to hassle the unlettered moteliers of Gisborne.

It's only that it's a tragedy that stops such things being farce.

There's more, of course. Much more. The Resource Management Act, Kyoto, Child Welfare, our sentencing system, the endless Republican twaddle that really amounts to no more than the wise ones telling the great unwashed, "You'd be far better off if one of us was in charge!"

In short, we find ourselves confronted by a vast and creaking plethora of areas dominated by the dangerous influence of academia and that most insidious form of bullying, expertise.

All proof that you don't need a box to have idiots.

In fact, more of the former could mean much less of the latter. As the marketing professors would say, "Don't start spewing, keep them viewing." It's got to be good for us.