Get an education! Says almost everyone in society. It’s supposed to cure stupidity, make one a productive member of society, give you access to well-paying jobs, and be a remedy to poverty.
Education has not benefitted me. The best thing I got out of it was meeting a lot of cool and smart people.
I was also a good student. As and Bs. I completed college and graduate school.
BUT whenever I use just about anything I’ve learned in school, I get disasterous results.
As if everything I learned was irrelevant to life. I feel pretty much the same way as I did with religion. If I would just pray enough and avoid sinning, God would bless me. Yet, I got very few good results when I did so.
I feel scammed.
As a future victim of my own education I want to add the following:
Isn’t the striving for a state of “being educated” inherently chauvinist anyway? I mean, how does your average person define what being “educated” is - it almost always means a foundational familiarity with externally defined canonical material, and anything outside of these canons (variable by field) is mocked as useless or esoteric.
See, I’m young and stupid and full of pluck, and I just can’t get it out of my head that something about these notions is seriously bourgeois and elitist. Someone will want to call me uneducated because I’ll have made it through my undergrad without reading Virgil or studying math or science; why don’t I get to call them uneducated for finishing college without reading Confucius?
That’s because an education isn’t really about the stuff you learn, it’s about the process of learning it. While you were learning subject matter that likely you won’t use much again, you were also learning how to think critically, motivate yourself, navigate uncaring bureaucracies, write better, and tons of other things. No, your professors didn’t lecture on these subjects, but in order to complete university (much less graduate school), you must have learned them. THAT’S what you apply in the real world, not the subject matter unless you happen to be pursuing that as a career path.
Feeling compelled by societal pressure to burn a massive hole in your pocket (not to mention credit rating) and nearly a decade of one’s life for something that they don’t feel confers any benefit? I can see it.
Then he’s a victim of the education system. The education itself is still neutral.
He’s not just saying that he wasted money and is in a worse situation than he was 6 years ago. He’s saying that every time he applies something he learned in school, he gets “disastrous results.” As though learning has made him a worse human being. I’m not buying it.
Now you’re just being pedantic. When it comes to actually undergoing an education, the two can’t be separated; they come as one thing.
Besides, I wanna venture a guess that this person’s got a liberal arts degree of some kind, meaning the “disastrous results” of applying his knowledge are probably related to its uselessness in most situations for anything other than looking like kind of a pretentious tool. Not to make assumptions, OP - I’m basing this on my own experience trying to apply what I’ve learned from my liberal arts degree-in-progress.
In general it does those things. That doesn’t mean it accomplishes them for everybody (that would be an absurd promise to make) and it doesn’t really address why you’re having problems using your education or what you can do about the situation.
No, it’s not chauvinist. I’m not sure what word you want here, and looking for excuses to show off your knowledge by criticizing other people for not knowing Virgil is extremely pompous, but that doesn’t mean getting a college education is a bad thing and it certainly doesn’t mean wanting one is somehow self-important or misguided.
You’re right - I wasn’t speaking of being educated as a bad thing, but being “educated” - Dr. Drake’s point represents well an ideal of education (and that’s AN ideal, not THE ideal, before anyone jumps down my throat), but in my flippant way I was only saying that it’s frustrating to have your worth in the eyes of snooty men in suits judged on the basis of your familiarity with what is a comparatively narrow and, to many, uninteresting corpus.