I have ranted about this before, but it deserves revisiting. I was talking with my friend the other day about what college means. I think a lot of people my age have parents who treated the college degree as some kind of success-measurement-threshold in launching their kids into the world ("well, at least they're educated, I did my job"). I think by now most people understand this as a socialization and class status exercise, because the bachelor's degree draws a line between the lower classes and the slightly less lower classes. Having a bachelor's degree, my friend said, is a just handy vetting qualification to weed out the people who didn't have judgment enough to figure out they should smoke someplace besides the boys' bathroom in high school. Having a college degree indicates all kinds of things to employers that we can't really say are the actual qualifications for a job: college degree = probably has enough sense to lay low and do his/her misbehavior out of sight, and participate in a scheme of expectations involving respect for hierarchy and maybe a little independent decision making. "Values"-wise it also probably indicates that someone comes from a non-threatening, bourgeois, SAT-prep-course-attending kind of household that most bosses (the ultimate bourgeois) can relate to. It's just a class indicator. I mean, my job requires a college degree. I load and unload a truck. Bachelor's degree required.
Yoga instruction, however, requires no college degree. You can teach yoga after a month of training for anywhere from three to seven thousand dollars. So there's that. There's a class thing involved in yoga-doing, but that's another story. Maybe later.
Martha, I can see where you're coming from on this. But I have to put in a word from a different perspective. I agree that from a purely pragmatic standpoint, college can be seen as rather a joke. But . . . if you look at it the way the ancient Greeks looked at education, I think it makes a lot more sense. I'm talking about the way that a liberal arts education can deepen and broaden and enrich a person's world view. About being exposed to profound ideas and earth-shaking discoveries and soul-filling aesthetic experiences. About being challenged in one's way of thinking, about seeing the world from the perspective of another culture, about stepping outside of the narrow view of our immediate family and neighborhood. About sorting out the whys and wherefores of history. I know there are people (autodidacts) who are capable of achieving this kind of knowledge on their own, but a liberal arts college education is probably more practical for most people. If more under-educated people had the opportunity to go to college, I think there would be less prejudice, less violence, less drug abuse, less abuse of living human beings and of the earth. Knowledge is very powerful, and college is a way of getting a whole bunch of it in a pretty structured and efficient way. So I'm still all for it. (In spite of all the disenchantment of seeing it from the inside, now that I'm one of the purveyors of this product . . .)
ReplyDeleteThat is some legit' wisdom, Dot - my viewpoint is a little entitled - after all, I did actually get to *go* to college and do that whole thing. And I think your perspective on the "purpose" of college (our culture shedding more of all the negative human attributes) is a great way view college as positive, as a cultural regulator and equalizer and not just a class distinguisher.
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