I was recently complimented, told I was intelligent and enlightened despite not having higher education.
I didn’t really think about the further implications of it until later, but I had a couple different things going on at the time the compliment was given. I was just trying to not be a jerk, I was being nice, I was just trying to honest about the topic being discussed (body image and confidence issues, mixed race family and child abuse/neglect and fostering or adopting were the topics if discussion) and I’ve reached a level of maturity, I actually feel like an adult and am losing the ability to farm give-a-damns about a lot of things.
As I said, I didn’t originally think about the implications but replaying the moment in my head later, how does just being an adult and true to myself make me intelligent and enlightened?
Have you ever had a moment like this happen to you?
It may have been meant as a compliment (or not), but either way, it reveals a certain arrogance and elitism in the speaker. Higher education is not the sine qua non* of intelligence, wisdom, or plain old human decency. You did well to not give a damn.
*Note the unnecessary use of a Latin phrase by an arrogant classically educated person.
The great thing about a degree in the Liberal Arts is that you get the sheepskin and disqualified from all but those jobs that ensure you’ll also get cred from the school of hard knocks
I would call this a “backhanded compliment”. Smile, and thank them for the compliment, even though they probably didn’t mean it as a compliment, and move on.
It could be what they meant is that you are what passed as a normal person 40 years ago and that in todays age with so many nutjobs succeeding in ways unimaginable just a few years ago you come across as intelligent
and enlightened In comparison.
I wasn’t there, so I don’t know exactly what was said or what was meant by it. There are all sorts of possibilities, some genuinely complimentary, others not. The person could have meant “You have an ability to think things through and organize and express your thoughts clearly that I mostly only see in college-educated people,” for example.
It’s too bad the person hadn’t just told the OP ‘I like what you said - way t’go!’ If it were one of my friends or coworkers, that would have been fine. But I understand some people want to be erudite in any conversation.
Similar to the OP. Note: both of us were newish college faculty.
“You’re a lot smarter than I thought you’d be coming from a state school.” Um, I got my PhD from a school ranked in the top 10 in the field. The other person went to Ivy League schools, none of them close to the top 10. That was not a compliment.
In seventh grade I was an average student and quite the introvert. My teacher that year wrote in my yearbook “more kids should be like you”. It made me really proud and stuck with me for many, many years.
Then 30 years later when I had my own kid and had a chance to visit his seventh grade class and saw just how insanely loud a bunch of 13 year-olds can be I wondered if he wrote that meaning more kids should learn to shut their yappers.
