Quoth Justin on AIM (quoted without his permission)
justin2me1 (10:13:23 PM): ours is the generation where everything connects to everything else. Our philosophy is transforming the six degrees of separation to three or two degrees.
justin2me1 (10:14:08 PM): we are narrowers
justin2me1 (10:16:50 PM): what I mean is that we have come to understand, both through the internet and through our media that everything connects. Call it social convergence. Sooner or later there won’t be a line between, say, theater and video games or painting and road repair… because anyone can make an argument about it.
This has had me thinking about a number of things for the last couple days. And right now I’m thinking about higher education.
I’m sure that, by now, most if not all of you realize that I highly value education. I am personally quite obsessed with learning, both for the fact that education affords you all sorts of new possibilities and your life and for the fact that I just think it’s fun. I love it.
My whole life, it has been told to me that going to school, going to college, etc are very important things. And they are, indeed, very important things. But I’m finding now that they aren’t necessarily important for all the reasons that I had been told they were. Not for people like me, anyway. The story always was that it was good to get a good education so that you could get a job, the assertion being that without a “good job” (I will take issue with these terms momentarily) you cannot have a “good life.”
But what is a “good job” anyway? Some would say that it’s something you love to do. Others would say that it’s anything that pays well. Very few seem to be able to come to terms with the idea of something that satisfies both of those criterea. But what bothers me about the “good job” assertion is that the vast majority of the time, your level of success, and the measure of just how “good” your job is, is all determined by the size of your salary.
And to me, this reflects a fundamental problem of values that disturbs me greatly. The assumption that money leads to happiness in and of itself. The idea that you can’t actually have a job that you love – the idea that if you have fun doing your work every day, you’re either insane or you don’t have a “real” job.
But this is the way it is a large portion of the time. And a lot of the time, “education” is pushed as the way to get that good job that will inevitably lead to a good life.
Through a combination of personal experience and ideas exchanged with many people at this point, I have come to reject this. Within the context of American culture at large today, I desire a good job about as much as I desire syphylis or an amputated left leg. And to that end, I have similar feelings about a good life. Everyone is so fixated on money that every other aspect of their life radiates outward from it like twisted, tangled sucker branches shooting from the trunk of a very ugly tree. True, I laugh at anyone who tries to live without it. But the point is that it’s a stupid way to live your life to let every last bit of it be controlled by money.
And I dislike the way that the educational system has been twisted and spun to support this societal mode. Education seems rarely accepted as being good in and of itself. You go to school to take classes. You take classes to get a degree. You get a degree so you can get one of those good jobs.
But as we have already established, I don’t want one of those good jobs, and yet I still value education greatly. I believe education is something that should exist to enrich one’s life and not just to act as a means to theoretically fatten one’s wallet in the long run.
So where does the convergence factor alluded to at the beginning of this come into play? Right here. Much as there is social convergence, there is educational convergence. I learned first hand that college means in no necessary way that learning will take place. It can, and indeed should, but it is not necesarily so. Likewise, just because someone isn’t in school somewhere, that doesn’t mean that they’re not learning. I don’t mean to suggest that something like going to college is unimportant. I only mean to suggest that college or any other form of education has become so varied and unpredictable that we shouldn’t necessarily expect it to be one thing in particular without question, particularly what we have always been told it is.
I finished my undergraduate two quarters early and bored, having completed the process with minimal academic challenge and lots of questions about where, exactly, the academia I had always dreamed of was. And I am now at a point where I am thinking about graduate school. Two more years and another degree. But now that I have seen just how formless and unpredictable education really is, I wonder if two more years of school and another degree is what I’m really looking for. If I can find myself in a truly good program, I would be stimulated, challenged, and it would be a worthwhile experience. But I also have to wonder of there is anything I can accomplish in graduate school that I could not accomplish better by doing other things on my own. I have enough friends and contacts within all the things I’m interested to get the kind of creative stimulation and challenging that I could get from a good grad program. About the only thing that I couldn’t get from doing things on my own if I do it right, is an official second degree.
This really only strikes me as a problem within certain circumstances. For example, if I wanted to teach at the college level, chances are they’d want me to have a masters. And even if I had done 5 years worth of work on my own that more than covered enough learning and personal growth for three masters degrees, if I didn’t have that sheet of paper that declared that I actually had a masters they’d either likely not hire me or make me get one officially.
A masters degree is a piece of paper, a title. Intrinsically, that paper and title mean very little at all in any necessary way. They’re supposed to stand for a certain amount of education and accomplishment, but with the way that the educational systems have been perverted and with the way that education now manifests itself in our very materialistic, consumerist society, there is no absolute correlation now between a degree and education, let alone significant accomplishment within a field.
Whoops…disclaimer time. As I’m approaching this, it is of course from the perspective of liberal arts. Becoming a doctor of medicine means you know something in a way that getting a masters of fine art does not.
I guess I don’t really know where I’m going with this. However, the basic point being, I think, that give the things I have learned over time due to media and interaction with others, is that must now question, oddly enough, education. The value of education to me is clear. What I question is how it is represented in the educational system of the US, both higher and lower, and what, exactly, it means to me as this convergence factor takes effect. Education is important, but not just because society dictates it, and it is not necessarily found in itse most valuable forms within the halls of schools and colleges.
I may well still go to graduate school. In fact, I think it rather likely. But I cannot rule out that I may attempt to learn the thigns I feel I want to learn and need to learn in a different way.
2024 historical note: I think this talk of convergence is where the name of this blog originated. I had no idea it was on my radar so long ago. Glad I’m republishing these old posts.
