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It didn't dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. 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 cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aim on Thursday December 29 2016, @07:55AM
Your education missed out on a classic: Socrates: "I know that I know nothing".
The more you learn, the more you realise that you don't really know much of anything. I find it rather surprising it took you that long to check this.
Have you never had to do some kind of practical-oriented internship? Over here, for a number of engineering-level types of studies, you *must* do one to even get accepted into the technical university. This typically is a basic 6 to 8 weeks course in metalworking/locksmithery, which gives you at least some grounding "in the real world".
A few years ago I had the opportunity to follow a course in woodsworking, and have kept at it as a hobby - something like that does wonders, working with your hands (not only your mind), getting a solid result (as opposed to virtual).
Seriously, get off your cloud and get your feet on the ground, it will do wonders. Oh, and do some sports. Mens sana in corpore sano!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday December 29 2016, @11:28AM
You are aware that this sentence means that there should be a healthy mind in the healthy body, and was actually targeted at the athletes of the time?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by aim on Friday December 30 2016, @06:55AM
Oh, and do some sports. Mens sana in corpore sano!
You are aware that this sentence means that there should be a healthy mind in the healthy body, and was actually targeted at the athletes of the time?
It goes both ways. A mind has a hard time staying healthy in a non-healthy body. A person should be well-rounded, at least have some basic level in pretty much anything. Of course, the definition of "basic level" and "anything" moves over time. Back in old Greece, you could get a good overview of mankind's knowledge and have time for keeping physically fit. Today's heaps of knowledge though don't mean that you should get a free pass to pig out and let your body go to waste, as your mind will likely follow.