even sven, I don’t think any of the posters here have any ill will towards you. If anything I think the criticism is more directed at what they perceive as unrealistic idealism.
I know you’ve had to live on a minimal income while you’ve been in college and I think most will agree that it’s a “life experience” all it’s own. As far as I’m concerned, getting a degree, being a responsible adult, and living within your (temporarily) meager means scores far more points than the places you’ve slept, the locations you’ve visited, the meals you ate or the people/things/places you’ve had sex with.
even sven, I don’t think any of the posters here have any ill will towards you. If anything I think the criticism is more directed at what they perceive as unrealistic idealism.
I know you’ve had to live on a minimal income while you’ve been in college and I think most will agree that it’s a “life experience” all it’s own. As far as I’m concerned, getting a degree, being a responsible adult, and living within your (temporarily) meager means scores far more points than the places you’ve slept, the locations you’ve visited, the meals you ate or the people/things/places you’ve had sex with.
It reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Abe gets the job cartooning and the boss tells the other writers that Abe has something that college can’t teach: Life Experience. Abe responds by saying, proudly, that he worked as a security guard for forty years.
It’s just stupid to think that turning a wrench gives one the knowledge to understand trade policy, international politics, or how to balance a checkbook. My sister, an HR person, once had to teach some math to a group of employees so that they could do some measurements & statisitcal work to decrease product variance. She had people in the factory who didn’t even understand what a negative number was and one woman, after the classes were over, thanked her because she could now balance her checkbook on her own and finally get away from her repressive husband because she had the skills to live on her own.
I can’t imagine what that slob you quoted was thinking either. How is learning directly from an expert in a field inferior to learning from an expert in a second or third hand manner? Instead of learning directly from someone who teaches at a college, you should read a book by someone who does? Or is it that working the counter at McDonalds can make you an expert on the nature of coporate governance?
js, it’s just some of the anti-intellectual hooey that Know-Nothings have been spouting since the 19th century. Conservatives dust it off and try to sell it as new but it’s even more logically invalid today than it was 150 years ago.
I don’t think Ray Bolger enjoys having you dig him up every time you think you’ve seen a point that you’re going to try and make. Calling me a jackass while going on and on about “life experience” and the merits of working at a blue colar job, things that I never even mentioned, is not going to win you any points. I stand by what I said:
Changing the subject from that to whatever point you are trying to make has nothing to go with the debate at hand.
Dave, I do not disagree with “Study and think, don’t just regurgitate what you’ve been told,” but that is not what the OP complains about, which was “Your first step, sven, is to absolutely forget everything that the (generally) enormously liberal facualty from college indoctrinated you with and go out and study on your own,” which gives the impression that you believe all that is taught in college is liberal bushwa. Perhaps that impression was not what you meant but it is what she understood you to mean.
Well, that’s fine and good DZ. I’m not denegrating a college education, considering I have two college degrees myself that would be kind of hypocrytical, wouldn’t it? What I am saying, and I stand by it, is that by and large, the facalty of most colleges is extremely liberal and often wrapped narrowly in the confines of abstract debates and academia, not the so called “real world”. The thrust of ES’s OP in GD involved the premise that people don’t have access to information, and that if it was just made available to them they would start to make more informed decisions reguarding things like politics and voting. This premise itself is shocking in it’s wide eyed idealism and naievity and smacks of ivory tower solutions that ignore the real world; “If people only had access to more information, they’d make the “correct” decision”. ( it works best if you wring your hands when you say this )It’s bunk, there is plenty of information available, many, if not most, people just don’t care. They’d rather watch Survivor than McNeil Lehrer. My response, which prompted this thread, was in reply to the OP but also to a post by MGibson. I’ll quote the entire exchange here, and you can judge for yourself, starting with my post:
Sven immediately responded:
Starting this thread and bypassing any chance I had to clarify what I meant by that statement, which I did, thus:
I think the entire cause of this thread is Sven being oversensitive to my remarks, taking them as a personal insult when they were not intended as such. Never the less, I stand by them, not just to Sven but to young people in general.
Well, Hillary Clinton has made jokes at her own expense about the idealistic, 60s liberal belief that if somebody doesn’t agree with you then you haven’t explained it enough.
I will admit that I had to reread your remarks because I had misread them, too, coloring my interpretation with my prejudices and assumptions. I still disagree with your assumptions as to just how liberal the average professor is, but most everything else works.
Well you did say my name. And you did use “you”, which presumably applies to the “sven” you mentioned earlier. And you did say that there was a lot of learnin’ out there that would surprise me once i stopped regurgiatating, which strongly implies that I personally don’t know much about what I’m talking about because I was given all that (generally liberal) stuff that I’m now apparently regurgitating. And most shockingly, you stated that this new learnin’ would come when I started studying on my own. I think that is what put me over the edge. Because it implies that I’m not thinking for myself. Because it’s not true. And it’s condenscending. And that pisses me off.
FWIW, I do know that art is political (thanks Gobear for helping my cause by pointing this out in the most condenscending way possible) and that my professors were a bunch of lefties. But first off, the things we were learning were so esoteric (I mean, who on Earth really cares the role of Lacanian psychology in the introduction of Dolby sound?) that it doesn’t really matter if our teachings were leftist or not. Film theory gets really really fucking bizarre, and it gets bizarre beyond the point of even worrying about the politics because it is first and formost bizarre. Trust me on this one. It looks more like a linguistic textbook and the journal of an old senile phychoanalyst got in a fight and were interpreted by a sociologist on LSD than what you’d think “film theory” would look like. I really don’t think you want to see me regurgitate this stuff.
Secondly, my profs were pretty good at what they did. All of our theory took a historical approuch. For example, instead of just handing us Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” as if it were fact, they told us that it was the foundations of feminist physchoanalysis in film theory and gave us a bunch of examples of the theories and films that came from (either by applying, changeing or argueing against) Mulvey’s ideas. We learned radical ideas, but learned them as a historical example of what some people think. Our own essays were expected to address previous ideas of film theory, but the end goal was for us always to come up with original analysis and our own theories which can build on, modify, or refute and replace the stuff we read in class. It was pretty rigourous stuff. And it did a pretty good job of teaching critical thinking.
Now there are a few majors that I think your criticism would apply pretty well too. But we’ll save that for another time…
)It’s bunk, there is plenty of information available, many, if not most, people just don’t care. They’d rather watch Survivor than McNeil Lehrer. My response, which prompted this thread, was in reply to the OP but also to a post by MGibson. I’ll quote the entire exchange here, and you can judge for yourself, starting with my post:
