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posted by janrinok on Thursday December 29 2016, @01:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-the-money-is-good dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:10AM (#447025)

    Yeah there's lots of money, but I've heard rumours that the administrator-teacher ratio has gone up in many places and some administrators are probably getting too much. Can't be bothered to verify at the moment.

    And the typical US reaction is that means Public Education is broken so instead of fixing it let's partially replace it with other stuff (home school, vouchers etc).

    If you're not the ruling caste and still want Democracy it's in your interest to try to get public education fixed. If you're in the ruling caste, congrats, just make sure Trump doesn't nuke us all (e.g. tell the Secretary of Defense he gets amnesty for shooting Trump dead if he tries to launch the nukes just because of some tweet).

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday December 29 2016, @03:23PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 29 2016, @03:23PM (#447094) Journal

    And the typical US reaction is that means Public Education is broken so instead of fixing it let's partially replace it with other stuff (home school, vouchers etc).

    That's my view as well.

    If you're not the ruling caste and still want Democracy it's in your interest to try to get public education fixed.

    Trying isn't working for a considerable portion of public schools. It's yet another place where the US spends a lot of public funds without getting appropriately good results.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Thursday December 29 2016, @04:39PM

      by Whoever (4524) on Thursday December 29 2016, @04:39PM (#447120) Journal

      And, right on schedule, khallow comes up with yet another unsupported Republican talking point.

      If public schools could be selective in the way private schools are, results would match private schools.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 29 2016, @05:01PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 29 2016, @05:01PM (#447130) Journal

        And, right on schedule, khallow comes up with yet another unsupported Republican talking point.

        A talking point doesn't become any more or less true just because you call it a talking point. In the US, there are large public school systems which are notoriously bad (and not in the sense of merely having bad students) and overseen by an elected school board. If democratic action were enough to prevent these systems from becoming that bad, then it would have happened by now.

        If public schools could be selective in the way private schools are, results would match private schools.

        And sometimes they do.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:13PM

          by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:13PM (#447207) Journal

          A talking point doesn't become any more or less true just because you call it a talking point.

          Unless, of course, the reason it is a talking point is that it is not true, and khallow's Republican masters have put out the word that the talking point is to be repeated enough to create the plausible impression that it might be true. This is a time whonored propaganda technique. Learned it from the Nazis!
              Besides, we know the US educational system sucks, since khallow cannot read Marx. Even in translation. So sad.