The nicest thing that can be said about college as an institution is that it gives the kids able to afford it an appropriately sheltered place to live out their prime criminal years in an environment where they will not be as harshly prosecuted for their various youthful hijinks as they would be if they were not in college. The not nice thing that can be said about college as an institutionat least as it exists in Americais that it is one of the most distilled expressions of the rot at the heart of how this country chooses to function: Take a public good (higher education), have Republicans choke its public financing, privatize it, make the ability of people to have a decent life dependent upon buying it, and then run it like a business, in the sense of creating lavish tiers for very rich customers and inflating prices to extortionate levels and attacking labor and climbing happily into bed with some of the most sociopathic billionaires the world has ever produced.
While there are legitimately important stories to be told about elite colleges and universitiesin particular their sly inclusion in the class war in the form of the adjunctification of their faculty and the way that they function to groom a superficially diverse cast of young people for their roles as the next generation of class war overseers at McKinsey and Wall Street and the halls of politicsthose are not the stories that most cultural commentators like to tell about them. Instead we get an obsessive and frankly bizarre focus on the rhetorical and political and fashion choices of a bunch of 20 year olds, who are held up as the collective Children of Omelas that all of society can come together to crucify so that sad adults can feel better about themselves. This weird tic, which pervades the media like an infectious disease, means that college does serve one more useful function: If you listen to people talk about it you can very quickly tell who is not worth listening to at all.
It is very easy to be annoyed by college kids. After all, they are young and healthy and have their whole lives ahead of them and the rest of us have already chosen our dreary paths, which we regret. Arithmetic tells you that college students have not had as many years to learn things as older people have had, and sometimes they act with the brashness and overconfidence of youth. This is a trivial observation about the nature of the human lifespan. It is not a weighty subject for political commentary. To the extent that any writer or politician or intellectual treats it as a matter that rises to the level of public importance, or, more absurdly, that reflects some new sociological trend that has not been present for the past several thousand years, the commentator in question is at best a fool and at worst a fraud. If you were to take the five hundred members of the US media who talk about college campuses the most and cast them all into the sea, the overall quality of our national discourse would rise significantly, because at least it would contain a lower amount of pure, goading distraction.
College campuses are little bubbles that exist outside of the real world. That is, of course, how they are designed. Getting mad at college kids for this fact, in the form of criticizing them for being sheltered, is sort of an upscale version of getting mad at prison inmates for being in prison. We put them there! Thats where they they are! What else are they supposed to do? Political protests on college campuses are set pieces, yes, but that is a very deliberate result that was engineered not by college students but by their institutions. To whatever extent college kids are able to break out of the comfortable trap of campus activism and connect their protests to the wider world, I salute them. As should we all.
Seen from this perspective, the protest encampments in support of Gaza that are sweeping elite college campuses across the nationand being ruthlessly crushed by riot cops at the same rateare valuable arenas of political education, more valuable than anything those kids will learn in the classroom. These experiences will teach these kids some of the most important truths they will need to know to accurately assess the way that America operates: That the polished people in charge of things are often merciless dictators at heart; That awful atrocities will be tolerated as soon as they can be ignored; That one millimeter beneath the smile of the boss lurks gritted teeth and a determination to call the cops to break your head open if you dont listen. To have young people set out to protest the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and then be met by hysterical repression from the same institutions that have been tasked with making them good citizens is one of the best lessons I can imagine. It is an act of wiping off the makeup to reveal the pig beneath. We wouldnt want that pig to be concealed forever, would we?
Just as important as the tear gas and the billy clubs and the administrations cancelling their graduation ceremonies are the words of those condemning the college kids for doing all of this. All of those wordsfrom the somber cable news hosts pretending to fret about chaos, from the insincere lobbyists trying to smear human rights as antisemitism, from the once-friendly politicians afraid to embrace obvious moral judgments due to the naked demands of empire, from the university administrators who turn from gentle friends to militant gremlins when the invisible line into actual disruption is crossedreveal the contours of the bullshit that envelops all of this. We send kids to college to learn, but not to understand; to become independent, but not independent minded; to become responsible, as long as that sense of responsibility does not extend to everyone else in the world. Sometimes, something so bad happens that it causes an uprising that breaks the whole facade. Vietnam was that for my parents generation, and Gaza is that now, and there will be other things to come. The people who think that this is all wrong just show that they never really understood what education is in the first place.
Education is vital. College is dumb. A fabulously expensive ticket to the middle class that is lorded over by middle managers who love giving speeches in goofy gowns, and take their orders from hedge fund managers who have sucked their fortunes out of the pockets of the working class and splash their names on campus buildings like two-year-olds declaring themselves the King of the World. The ability to make a good living in the higher ed industry is inversely proportional to the amount you actually care about education. Universities are, at best, a grand sorting ground that divides those who can and cannot see through bullshit. Im sorry that a lot of kids may get kicked in the teeth in coming weeks to learn this. But the adults who arent smart enough to see that the kids are right are a much, much greater tragedy.
tl;dr but it really is.
Why the hell did I have to take four English classes and two history classes, which were all dumbed down rehashes of classes I took as a damn freshman in high school...
for an engineering degree ?
Basically one in three, maybe two classes were what I actually wanted to study and the rest were irrelevant bullshit.
tl;dr but it really is.
Why the hell did I have to take four English classes and two history classes, which were all dumbed down rehashes of classes I took as a damn freshman in high school...
for an engineering degree ?
Basically one in three, maybe two classes were what I actually wanted to study and the rest were irrelevant bullshit.
tl;dr but it really is.
Why the hell did I have to take four English classes and two history classes, which were all dumbed down rehashes of classes I took as a damn freshman in high school...
for an engineering degree ?
Basically one in three, maybe two classes were what I actually wanted to study and the rest were irrelevant bullshit.
Your experience didn't match mine. I went for basically engineering, technically an architect, but I had no English classes. Every single class I took seemed at least somewhat related to the profession, if not clearly central. Few of them were basic enough to even possibly be taught to high school students unless they were in advanced classes late in high school after building up to it through earlier courses.
Did you go to Trump University?
Stopped reading when they said students live out their prime criminal years in college.
eh it's good to have knowledge of other fields. They let us choose what our English class was about, and I learned a good deal about film in mine.That's nice.
That's nice.Im convinced the books English curriculums make students read are actively designed to make the populace hate reading. As a reader who hates all that shit, it offends me.
I got to study Great the hell Expectations for the THIRD DAMN TIME.
That's nice.
I got to study Great the hell Expectations for the THIRD DAMN TIME.
That's nice.Sounds like bad college curricula.
I got to study Great the hell Expectations for the THIRD DAMN TIME.
Im convinced the books English curriculums make students read are actively designed to make the populace hate reading. As a reader who hates all that shit, it offends me.100%
Stopped reading when they said students live out their prime criminal years in college.I mean it is true that 18-22 is like peak getting into trouble with the law time.
Seen from this perspective, the protest encampments in support of Gaza that are sweeping elite college campuses across the nationand being ruthlessly crushed by riot cops at the same rateare valuable arenas of political education, more valuable than anything those kids will learn in the classroom. These experiences will teach these kids some of the most important truths they will need to know to accurately assess the way that America operates: That the polished people in charge of things are often merciless dictators at heart; That awful atrocities will be tolerated as soon as they can be ignored; That one millimeter beneath the smile of the boss lurks gritted teeth and a determination to call the cops to break your head open if you dont listen. To have young people set out to protest the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and then be met by hysterical repression from the same institutions that have been tasked with making them good citizens is one of the best lessons I can imagine. It is an act of wiping off the makeup to reveal the pig beneath. We wouldnt want that pig to be concealed forever, would we?At least read this I think it is astute
Just as important as the tear gas and the billy clubs and the administrations cancelling their graduation ceremonies are the words of those condemning the college kids for doing all of this. All of those wordsfrom the somber cable news hosts pretending to fret about chaos, from the insincere lobbyists trying to smear human rights as antisemitism, from the once-friendly politicians afraid to embrace obvious moral judgments due to the naked demands of empire, from the university administrators who turn from gentle friends to militant gremlins when the invisible line into actual disruption is crossedreveal the contours of the bullshit that envelops all of this.
I've never met a smart person who thinks it was dumb we had to take classes outside of our majorAlso this. Some of the experiences and lessons that have impacted me most were from the classes that had very little if nothing to do with my major.
I've never met a smart person who thinks it was dumb we had to take classes outside of our majorYou still haven't. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm passionate about this.
tl;dr but it really is.If your college classes are dumbed down compared to fucking freshman high school classes you should be questioning where you went to college.
Why the hell did I have to take four English classes and two history classes, which were all dumbed down rehashes of classes I took as a damn freshman in high school...
for an engineering degree ?
Basically one in three, maybe two classes were what I actually wanted to study and the rest were irrelevant bullshit.
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/college-is-an-education-in-bullshitYou didn't even read this LOL
tl;dr but it really is.Because you attended a university which is supposed to make you somewhat well rounded instead of focusing on a single thing only
Why the hell did I have to take four English classes and two history classes, which were all dumbed down rehashes of classes I took as a damn freshman in high school...
for an engineering degree ?
Basically one in three, maybe two classes were what I actually wanted to study and the rest were irrelevant bullshit.
Alright so explain something to me. I thought the whole K-12 system was supposed to get you to be "well rounded" and that college was explicitly where you went to specialize. Where's the disconnect between this perception and the actual reality of all you edumacated folk?Bruh public school literally just pushes you through with no regard to actually learning. Texas public schools taught me lost cause narrative.
I can't f***ing stand that "edumacated" not only doesn't trigger spellcheck, googling it also brings up a definition.This just made my whole damn day.
Im convinced the books English curriculums make students read are actively designed to make the populace hate reading.
Bruh public school literally just pushes you through with no regard to actually learning. Texas public schools taught me lost cause narrative.I mean yes, the k-12 system is absolute dogshit, but I've still never heard that college is supposed to make you well rounded outside of the context of it potentially forcing someone to leave their little pond.
If i didnt go to college id be like half the person i am now
This just made my whole damn day."Glad" to be of service.
college was explicitly where you went to specialize.Tech/trade schools are where you go to specialize. Im genuinely not sure where you got the idea thats what college was for. College is continuing education and a fancy piece of paper, and the education part is only as useful as you can afford and what you get out of it.