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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) by FatPhil on Thursday December 29 2016, @09:19AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 29 2016, @11:48AM
Philosophy has always been arguing. If it's not how you do it, you're doing it wrong.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday December 29 2016, @12:12PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @02:10PM
No they weren't.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 29 2016, @05:13PM
Conversations can be enlightening. Arguments can be both entertaining and educational. Both of these men were senior to me by several years, it wasn't my place to discipline them!
(Score: 2) by cellocgw on Friday December 30 2016, @01:29PM
They weren't having a conversation at that stage, they were having an argument.
No, they were having contradiction. Argument was down the hall.
Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190) resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume