As the few people who personally know me on here can attest, there are not many who believe in a formal education more so than I, especially when it comes to the sciences. A friend of mine worked with a small team designing the refueling dynamics of the space shuttle while in orbit (the space shuttle, not them). He was in the final year of a combined undergrad/masters program at a very good engineering school. This effort would simply not be possible without many years of serious academic effort. Does anyone need a PhD in English? I think maybe not and most people with a decent academic underpinning and a critical mind would be equally successful by just reading. And I think they would also be happier in the process. I have too much schooling and only half of it appears on my resume because not only does it become a visual riot of academia but it reminds me of all the years I could have spent earning money rather than spending mountains of cash on it.
I have many criticisms about our educational system and there are two that are relevant to the conversation. The first criticism is social stratification. Does anyone here think that Common Core would fly at Andover? Not a fucking chance. Those kids are being prepped for an exceedingly competitive higher education and they look to be prepared in every way possible. Common Core is stunting to that effort. And you simply do not social engineer the upper crust, they do the engineering. The second criticism is in what having an education really means. I was once impressed by expensive letters. How terribly foolish I was to ascribe to them so many qualities that were implied and not necessarily earned. To paraphrase Lowlight, ownership does not signify competency.
Because I keep ranting-deleting, ranting-deleting... I will quote someone far more eloquent:
"It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about thirty-five. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was—a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent—and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being canceled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled, is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
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But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “Nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from."
- William Deresiewicz
Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.
—William Hazlitt, 1821
Having been to the schools of both the haves, and the haves-not, I think the primary difference is with the parent (early on) and with the students (later on). Without a parent(s) or other role model capable of making a serious impression it is less likely for the child to pursue a good education. The problem of education in America will not be solved by think tanks, congressional sub-committees, or teachers unions. They will be solved, or not, in the home.