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 Dr Spin on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:05AM
They're about brainwashing the kids into believing they really are superior to their fellows in the public schools
Of course, here in the UK, "public schools" means the elete of the private schools.
However, an substantially bigger problem is that the entire leftist movement is engaged in convincing its supporters that they
are inferior to pretty much everyone, so that they must be rescued by their fellow leftists - through a process of attacking
those who, by definition are more powerful and control the world. The track record of lambs attacking wolves and leopards
is not very good. However, "reality is an eletist conspiracy", so this does not apply to you! (I am not implying Trump will save
anyone - except himself).
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!