I'd say, with a few exceptions (including the fact that you could carve out a few classes on each toxic campus), we no longer really have universities. We have criminally expensive daycare centers for the weirdos, the ignorant, and the mental defectives. That's the faculty and staff. I'll allow others to talk about the students.
I always push back a bit on this line. I know where it comes from, and a thousand examples can be offered to justify it, but for my part I’ve spent a lot of time in college and I’ve never failed to find great teachers and solid programs for which I was deeply grateful. I studied Hebrew Bible under one of the leading scholars in the country and got a firsthand experience, through direct interaction, in his theories and methods. I took Attic Greek 101 from one of the main authorities in Greek comedy and 102 from the (at he time) editor of the leading archeological Journal in America. As @Stone Age Herbalist pointed out today in his latest essay, there are a lot of great things happening in universities despite all the genuinely bad stuff. There’s a revival coming; it won’t look exactly like what came before, but I have no doubt it will be better than what we have now.
I always found good teachers, too. But although I am out of the uni world now, I have friends and family that are still in it. Nothing they've told me makes me think there is hope for turning this around. A close relative who is a dean of a sane department in a "christian" uni has reinforced how poor the quality of thinking is, how *very* bad the decision making on who to hire and why, and how very little students are getting for their massive investment. We sent one son to what we thought was a top quality christian college only to find out that they were just as demented there as everywhere else (with the exception of a few great teachers that he loved). I think people are better off educating themselves and taking the odd class here and there online. There are many fine adjuncts but the quality of the tenured faculty is not good in too many cases. It's the old thing about how A players always want to hire A players. But B players always want to hire C players.
I had no idea Attic Greek was that different. I know people complain about Koine Greek, and especially Pontic Greek, but I had no idea that was another annoying dialect. Then again, my exposure is mostly through coin collecting.
If you like to sneak a peak at my blog, The divine center, and Knowledge vs Experience, it is about human infatuation with the knowledge, or leaning into one own strengths, rather than love for the Truth/ God...human curiosity or desire to compete with God :)) and how price of anything gives off a clue, if we are talking about true knowledge, as God will never inspire people who want to earn fortunes :) That follows the logic of the Bible. Or the article I am who i am, about labels and superficiality of the world.
It seems so odd, to blame *schools* for the lack of reading.
When I was in school, I read 3, maybe 4 whole books, as assignments. That's it. And yet. I read hundreds of books. Trashy SF and fantasy, mystery novels, true-life adventure stories, books on archaeology and horticulture, drawing and how-to books, encyclopedias of insects, plants, and birds, the entire Bible (because I was bored in Spanish class), Norman Cohn's *The Pursuit of the Millenium* (fascinating!), Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls (on which I wrote a paper, for 10th grade social studies, because why not?)... if the schools had never assigned me a single book, nobody could have *prevented* me reading them.
There are many more plausible things to blame for the decline in reading. Schools ain't it.
I blame the cost of bookshelves and the relentless electronic conquest of boredom.
I grew up in a house crammed to the rafters with books, and no TV. But now that I have a family of my own, I find shelf space the primary limiting factor. Five bookcases in our living room alone, and still we cannot approach my parents' levels of book-hoarding, and barely manage to keep our children supplied with reading material. We supplement with e-readers, but it's not the same.
"... electronic conquest of boredom" is the critical factor. Plus we are over stimulated at work by starting at blue screens all day, it induces an agitation that makes me quite restless. Reading after a long day at the keyboard can be a challenge.
Absolutely I have. There are many I have missed out on due to long hours and grind that I subject myself too. So I know that those habits from the grind have conditioned me away from cracking open the book and reading in a quiet room. I confess I fight an addition of the stimulation of background noise and “information” and the rush of dopamine from discovery of new information. The blue screen hours don’t help me in that respect.
I in fact buy most of our books at thrift shops, for anywhere from fifty cents apiece to a whopping three dollars.
But it's gauche to keep them in heaps on the floor, and the children tend to use them as fort-building materials if they don't have a designated place in the home library. Most shelves that don't cost as much as the downpayment on a new car, are sad things made of particle board, suitable only for stuffed animal collections. Fill them with books, and they sag alarmingly.
They are difficult to find secondhand, even. Once people have a good bookshelf, they do not easily part with it. When they die, their heirs strip the things out of the house before the estate sale. Every time we score even a small solid-lumber unit at a charity shop, we feel like we have just robbed the place, and need to make a quick getaway before somebody catches us with it.
Often! So far, my limited carpentry skills have not been up to the technical challenges of extracting usable lumber from pallets (we have broken most of the pieces we detached), or turning the short, thin, splintery lumber obtained thereby into a structurally sound shelf more than three feet tall.
Not that low shelves are not useful... it's just that those are the easiest to find at thrift shops anyway, and I already have one under nearly every window, with bookends on top to make another row.
By “schools”, I think we can generalize to mean both poor careerist teachers and the administrative apparatus at most K-12 school districts. Therefore, the complaint follows.
However, for the reasons both you and LoC mention, the access to good reading material and high-quality distance-learning teachers is getting harder and harder to squeeze out of “respectable” circles, and many have already woken to the value of homeschooling so as to stop wasting our children’s time.
When I dropped out of law school it wasn’t because I was a bad student or my grades were bad, it was because of the sheer disappointment and disgust I felt in the college environment, I vividly remember the moment I decided to drop out, the teacher of “history of law and power structures” asked the class to read just 4 books of the “Politica” by Aristotle, I had read that book before and anyone who has knows it’s a relatively short book…so I asked the professor in private why didn’t he asked the class to read the entire thing, it could even be read in one sitting or at most within a week, and he had given us 2 months to read only 4 short books of the work…he answered me with “if I tell the class to read the entire book no one will read it”, I remember thinking “so what? This is a university not a fucking social club just fail them in the subject” but I did not voice my opinion, that was the moment I asked myself what was I doing waking up at 4 am to be on time for college so I could spend my entire morning sitting still in a classroom that more resembled a high school than my idea of how academia was supposed to be like…I dropped out about a week after that.
:)) may I ask what did you do for living later? You are right, because the teachers themselves like methodology more than improvements and Truth....people love to think that their work is so valuable if it is like a slow motion picture where every single detail must be explained to the people with slower processors lol like a room where you can not.live but just observe . ANDpeaople behave like that in life later.....0 flexibility of the mind, only flexibility of Heart haha, change of heart is momentarily.
I did a lot of stock trading which is rather depressing to me, as while I was very successful at it is something I consider to be a lowly occupation that took a really heavy toll on my health for the three years I actively traded all day and lost sleep studying economics and the market, honestly I don’t recommend it and while i did made enough money to afford to not work a day job for a while the toll it took on my health at every level was extremely heavy, I am 22 years old btw.
hahaha oh man you are so young!!! I know I was doing the same only in institutional setting and I am twice your age lol. Btw it is hard to tell weather it was stress or COVID or both that took a toll on your health. Do not get discouraged if you really love it and not doing it just for money. You can scale back until you collect some experience! It is like tennis it takes 10 years to master the skill. Although S&P looks more like MAdoff fund than real free market lol
It wasn’t Covid and I mean the toll that the stress took on my blood pressure, I’m slowly recovering and sleeping better but damn I really didn’t had to go that hard in retrospect, also I don’t like any financier work I did it because I saw no other option, in a healthier time period I’d earn money more honestly through a military career or through farming and land ownership but that’s rather hard to do in this day and age, and my boomer aunt sold her part of the family farm to someone outside the family which made the place economically unsustainable and forced the rest of the family to sell that land that was settled and worked by my grandfather with his large cattle herds, I would like to once again state my hatred for boomers and their disregard for family legacy.
it is COVID young man! you can not know all :)) believe me!
military?? who are you going to fight for?? your corrupt deep state?? Ukraine! Jeeeez, stick to the trading! there is nothing dishonest in trading as individual, you can not rig the market lol
people are all corrupt, boomers are not worse nor better than the rest, do something you love, it will never be 100% enjoyment! that kind of work does not exist, but something where you will grow, it must be challenging.....this was COVID! 22 y high blood pressure, give me a break i was stressed and no toll on my health in your age , it starts only after the age of 30!
Well considering that my country and specially my region within my country did not enact major COVID related restrictions in any significant margin for more than two months(such as the closing down of gyms during this short period), and that I live a fairly active lifestyle complete with constant boxing and grappling training, I would say these circumstances were not, therefore, related to any major changes to my mental and physical health, but it was rather the stress of “needing to win big” and “overperform” which drove me into the pursuit of success in the market, and while there’s nothing particularly wrong with wealth in itself it does fill me with shame that I was unable to build my personal wealth with the creation of value or providing of a necessary and honorable service, rather than the movement of value through the system of commerce and finance, I find this specific pursue to be somewhat incompatible with my nature but nonetheless necessary for the building up of monetary assets in this current day and age.
I understand your confusion as from my fluency in what I assume to be your mother language I could be mistaken for an American or otherwise some other Anglo sphere nation resident, however I am ethnically southern European and have lived in South America from my birth although I have traveled through Europe as well as central, south and North America on several occasions and for several motives, as for serving the military notice how I stated “in a healthier time” this is in relation to the degenerated age upon which we dwell in which a military career offers little advantage and more importantly, significantly less honorable causes for enlistment or pursuit of a officers career, if I had been born in a different period I would have probably followed the path I almost did and pursued a degree in military sciences in my nations army military officer academy, or alternatively, would be in charge of my family’s farm which is now no more.
The “Open Exam” was already invented hundreds of years ago in China and is required to enter civil service. That’s why they have smart leaders and we have dumb ones.
Women are conformers. We self conform and enforce peers to conform to the norms of the day. It’s an innate female discipline which is powerful for building, maintaining or destroying a culture and society. It is coded in our biology as part of nurturing our own children to be safely integrated into the society.
The University system in particular is the ultimate example for women. But, it requires us to conform to society and reject our biology. Until we are willing to accept our biology and build our society around it we will continue to have painful consequences for men and women in the push and pull of the culture.
Well, not all, or at least, not all in the same ways--see the delightful exchange about norms between the characters Violet and Lily and in Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress.
Me too. When I read about what University and Academia are supposed to be, in the likes of Josef Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture and Michael Oakeshott's "The Voice of Liberal Learning". It makes me nostalgic for a University that I never really got to experience. Don't get me wrong, I had a great college experience, all things considered. I added philosophy as a major in addition to computer science. Computer Science I studied purely for its utility, but philosophy I studied for the sake of learning and the love of knowledge itself. I just fell in love with the liberal arts. I feel like few people understand the actual idea of a university. Those on the left who want to use it to advance ideology, and those on the right who want to just be a way to level up and make more money.
After a lifetime of building houses, I got a masters scholarship and a teaching fellowship in poetry at well-known university, and though I later returned to construction happily, several aspects of my experience were ideal. This was around 2000, and all my professors were fanatically passionate about their subject, and deep sources of information—just their reading lists were invaluable. Also enhancing my experience was the fact that I already knew who I was, and what I wanted from the education—and it was not a job or a certificate. If this was an ideal situation, and it was for me, I think it says a lot about my experience in school from kindergarten to the twelfth grade, as you can imagine. And a lot too about my efforts to educate myself. Frost wrote well about this:
“Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by.
Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs
cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will
stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.”
"The old Latin collegia refers to any kind of voluntary association, but in the academic sense it represents a brotherhood (though always leavened with a few sisters) dedicated to the life of the mind, a secular (or not-so-secular) priesthood, the Brahmanical equivalent of the mannerbund. It’s elite but it’s no luxury; without it, we wither, becoming the grey goo mass that liberalism would make of us."
This, right here, is the true nobility that we're lacking in our modern day. The training of mind and manners, of virtue and vice, necessary to create a class and culture the the peasants can look up towards to emulate. That there should be people, who justly have a leisure of time, to pursue such goods and training.
Every Polis needs it, every culture has different outward embodiments of it. But, it is a good to have.
And, lacking it in, as you say, we wither into a gray, liberal goo.
The last bastion of the life of the mind in Academia is the driven students pursuing independent studies.
Independent/directed studies have a much heavier reading load and it's basically impossible to hide having not read. Only the driven students do them, and the connections from working with professors is how you get places. The good-old-boy system and letters of recommendation and the grace of God are the only things keeping a few lights on in Academia.
The Oxford model is 1 on 1 tutorials with professors. 12 to 18 person seminars can still work. Beyond that, there are folks who don't belong and they've got folks who do to hide behind.
My alma mater, as of next year, will not allow any course to run with an enrolment smaller than 30. It's not hard to predict what that will mean for the Faculty of Arts. The end is nigh. The thing is, it doesn't even upset me anymore. I'm at the point where I think it would be kinder to cancel the arts programs immediately rather than let them desperately flail and thrash for several years.
I've been an academic tourist most of my life since a degree was already diluted back in the 90s when I came along. I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid and after spending a few years in the building trades, I returned through the community college system and then matriculated through the transfer programs. I dropped out of my English program because I sat in upper division classes as an adult and not a frat bro or Bob Marley fan and was able to read the social cues happening with my professors. I was also able to decipher most of them as having found and clung to a job that put them writing adjacent while having no idea how to make the leap between classroom and publication.
Imagine calling a plumber and finding out he's been teaching plumbing but never really done a field repair or an installation into rough framing?
The writer in residence one semester (or two, can't remember) was always busy working in his temp office, but he grabbed me one day in the hall after I'd submitted a story for a scholarship contest for which he was the arbiter. He quietly looked at me and said "You don't need any of this. These people are wasting your time. Just go write." That conversation was mostly because I had already learned the trade model of working and how it applied to writing. You have to write every day, but you also have to try and improve every day and hold yourself to a high standard. Hardly anyone did that in the team of folks "teaching" writing.
I got up in class and grabbed my stuff, maybe a week later after that intentionally quiet hallway conversation, and didn't return to class. I got a job in a factory so I could have a regular work schedule, and I wrote every single day. I went through a phase of reading those lame "be a writer" books and finally realized that was a scam too. So, I just bulldozed my way along.
I went back to Uni some years later after the market crash in 2008 to follow a science track since I stumbled upon an aptitude for Physics and Chemistry in my self directed studies. By then the University system was filled with now unbridled activist women and the "me too" thing hit. They decided they couldn't let a white male take a spot from _________ (name the protected class, any protected class) and deflated my grades to prevent me from being able to even apply for a Doc program I wanted to do. All while I was dragging the ringleader prof's undergrad sex toy girlfriend along through research methods and Anatomy as an unpaid tutor. The Girl Toy matriculated to the program I'd been eyeing because she was the right kind of student and got glowing recommendations from her prof girlfriend.
So, I talked to my lawyer, whose motorcycle collection I kept running, and he described it as "the state's attorneys will simply drag you along with emails and meetings until you're broke. You won't even get it in front of a judge for less than 100k, so just let it go."
I got up in class one day, picked up my stuff, and didn't go back.
I've managed to create my own ghost writing business, some of which are best sellers and most of which are top 10, out of the same model I ran successful trade businesses. I've done really well for myself without the University stamp. But now I have kids and I'd like for them to realize education matters in more than one regard as I'm teaching them to read, rite, and 'rithmetic. So, I crammed all my credits together and found a good online program where I didn't have to maintain the pretense of it being anything but checking a task off my list. In about 8 weeks I'll be graduating.
This forthcoming degree will make no difference in my income or my career arc because I've done all that myself, in spite of the insistence by Universities that they still matter. One of the fun little secrets of the publishing business is a lot of people in Ed. chairs take a lot of delight in writing checks to a guy who didn't come through the lit program at Vassar or Berkeley and can actually work. The people who grew up never completing a book also can't sit down every day and treat writing like a job. I can and do.
There are bright spots and people that influenced me positively in that educational journey. Many of my adjunct professors in Community College were the best teachers I've ever had. Truly, they were the polar opposite of the tenured whose true talent is the politics of ladder climbing and backstabbing while teaching was an odious obligation to be openly loathed. These were humble professionals who showed up to impart knowledge and help folks white-knuckling a second chance learn. In each of them I remember a bizarre kindness that contrasted with the ego driven indifference of the upper division colleagues.
If there were a retirement model where I could live on a decent campus and take classes with people my age, I'd do that too. I enjoy learning informally and formally. I very much like the group setting of classes with curious and effervescent minds who make insightful comments or pose provocative questions. I would pursue a Paleontology degree just because dinosaurs were one of my first interests as a kid.
My goal now is to expose my kids to the idea that education is a game you play so you can get away from it as quickly as possible with a credential. If we want to learn seriously, we have to be autodidacts and forget the system, or take advantage of emerging tech that can help us with structured learning at a self-regulated (but ambitious) pace. That's already begun with mine in preschool where they basically operate in a crowd control environment with rainbow pusher activists masquerading as teachers. Even now, post hurricane with no schools open, we sit down every day and work on letters, numbers, etc. whether we're going to school or not. When school reconvenes, we'll still be working on that stuff daily because the system at all levels can't be trusted to do a good job.
The biggest blessing of all the short sighted academics getting what they wanted is the emergence of the internet learning model rendering them useless in their credential forts. It's a delicious revenge that they have been rendered inert by their own insufferable yet predictable actions.
*sorry, this is stream of consciousness while I'm on my first cup so it's ragged and wandering*
All amazing stuff. In the US, in my state, residents over 62 can take classes in state colleges for free without the promise of credit. It would be nice not to have to wait that long, but I’ve had students like that in the past and I wouldn’t mind being one myself.
You can audit many private university classes without paying. I probably owe the University of Chicago a six-figure sum for the classes I audited. No one complained, ever.
Your commitment to learning, knowledge and education inspires me. Your politics don’t resonate with me, as I’m precisely the liberal, of the woke variety, that creates so much irritation to the right. But I can tell a love of learning when I see it, and I can honor it as well. Keep writing. Your voice is important
I spent a lifetime in colleges and universities (well, 10 years), collected four degrees, and never felt they were the bastions of learning you describe so lovingly. I probably went to the wrong ones.
In any event, the university system in my mind resembles the one you love and want to rebuild. I share your enthusiasm.
One day perhaps the money will drain out of academia and the only people who stay in it will be the ones that really want to be there Can't happen soon enough in my opinion.
I'd say, with a few exceptions (including the fact that you could carve out a few classes on each toxic campus), we no longer really have universities. We have criminally expensive daycare centers for the weirdos, the ignorant, and the mental defectives. That's the faculty and staff. I'll allow others to talk about the students.
I always push back a bit on this line. I know where it comes from, and a thousand examples can be offered to justify it, but for my part I’ve spent a lot of time in college and I’ve never failed to find great teachers and solid programs for which I was deeply grateful. I studied Hebrew Bible under one of the leading scholars in the country and got a firsthand experience, through direct interaction, in his theories and methods. I took Attic Greek 101 from one of the main authorities in Greek comedy and 102 from the (at he time) editor of the leading archeological Journal in America. As @Stone Age Herbalist pointed out today in his latest essay, there are a lot of great things happening in universities despite all the genuinely bad stuff. There’s a revival coming; it won’t look exactly like what came before, but I have no doubt it will be better than what we have now.
https://www.stoneageherbalist.com/p/a-mesolithic-slave-executed-in-neolithic
I always found good teachers, too. But although I am out of the uni world now, I have friends and family that are still in it. Nothing they've told me makes me think there is hope for turning this around. A close relative who is a dean of a sane department in a "christian" uni has reinforced how poor the quality of thinking is, how *very* bad the decision making on who to hire and why, and how very little students are getting for their massive investment. We sent one son to what we thought was a top quality christian college only to find out that they were just as demented there as everywhere else (with the exception of a few great teachers that he loved). I think people are better off educating themselves and taking the odd class here and there online. There are many fine adjuncts but the quality of the tenured faculty is not good in too many cases. It's the old thing about how A players always want to hire A players. But B players always want to hire C players.
I know I sound black-pilled but I'd just like to say that nothing would please me more than being wrong. And in the end, I know that God is sovereign.
I had no idea Attic Greek was that different. I know people complain about Koine Greek, and especially Pontic Greek, but I had no idea that was another annoying dialect. Then again, my exposure is mostly through coin collecting.
If you like to sneak a peak at my blog, The divine center, and Knowledge vs Experience, it is about human infatuation with the knowledge, or leaning into one own strengths, rather than love for the Truth/ God...human curiosity or desire to compete with God :)) and how price of anything gives off a clue, if we are talking about true knowledge, as God will never inspire people who want to earn fortunes :) That follows the logic of the Bible. Or the article I am who i am, about labels and superficiality of the world.
It seems so odd, to blame *schools* for the lack of reading.
When I was in school, I read 3, maybe 4 whole books, as assignments. That's it. And yet. I read hundreds of books. Trashy SF and fantasy, mystery novels, true-life adventure stories, books on archaeology and horticulture, drawing and how-to books, encyclopedias of insects, plants, and birds, the entire Bible (because I was bored in Spanish class), Norman Cohn's *The Pursuit of the Millenium* (fascinating!), Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls (on which I wrote a paper, for 10th grade social studies, because why not?)... if the schools had never assigned me a single book, nobody could have *prevented* me reading them.
There are many more plausible things to blame for the decline in reading. Schools ain't it.
I blame the cost of bookshelves and the relentless electronic conquest of boredom.
I grew up in a house crammed to the rafters with books, and no TV. But now that I have a family of my own, I find shelf space the primary limiting factor. Five bookcases in our living room alone, and still we cannot approach my parents' levels of book-hoarding, and barely manage to keep our children supplied with reading material. We supplement with e-readers, but it's not the same.
"... electronic conquest of boredom" is the critical factor. Plus we are over stimulated at work by starting at blue screens all day, it induces an agitation that makes me quite restless. Reading after a long day at the keyboard can be a challenge.
But have you tried purchasing a quality bookcase lately?
Absolutely I have. There are many I have missed out on due to long hours and grind that I subject myself too. So I know that those habits from the grind have conditioned me away from cracking open the book and reading in a quiet room. I confess I fight an addition of the stimulation of background noise and “information” and the rush of dopamine from discovery of new information. The blue screen hours don’t help me in that respect.
IOW I have given up the Kindle, need the pages of a book to break that spell.
You can get literally hundreds of books at library sales for a hundred or so dollars.
It is electronics and the dearth of book culture outside of just collecting them like Booktok.
I in fact buy most of our books at thrift shops, for anywhere from fifty cents apiece to a whopping three dollars.
But it's gauche to keep them in heaps on the floor, and the children tend to use them as fort-building materials if they don't have a designated place in the home library. Most shelves that don't cost as much as the downpayment on a new car, are sad things made of particle board, suitable only for stuffed animal collections. Fill them with books, and they sag alarmingly.
They are difficult to find secondhand, even. Once people have a good bookshelf, they do not easily part with it. When they die, their heirs strip the things out of the house before the estate sale. Every time we score even a small solid-lumber unit at a charity shop, we feel like we have just robbed the place, and need to make a quick getaway before somebody catches us with it.
Have you considered pallet wood?
Often! So far, my limited carpentry skills have not been up to the technical challenges of extracting usable lumber from pallets (we have broken most of the pieces we detached), or turning the short, thin, splintery lumber obtained thereby into a structurally sound shelf more than three feet tall.
Not that low shelves are not useful... it's just that those are the easiest to find at thrift shops anyway, and I already have one under nearly every window, with bookends on top to make another row.
Have you tried a pallet buster?
It's on my wishlist ;)
By “schools”, I think we can generalize to mean both poor careerist teachers and the administrative apparatus at most K-12 school districts. Therefore, the complaint follows.
However, for the reasons both you and LoC mention, the access to good reading material and high-quality distance-learning teachers is getting harder and harder to squeeze out of “respectable” circles, and many have already woken to the value of homeschooling so as to stop wasting our children’s time.
Well, yes. We homeschool ours. It'd be disrespectful of their time and intellects to send them to school.
When I dropped out of law school it wasn’t because I was a bad student or my grades were bad, it was because of the sheer disappointment and disgust I felt in the college environment, I vividly remember the moment I decided to drop out, the teacher of “history of law and power structures” asked the class to read just 4 books of the “Politica” by Aristotle, I had read that book before and anyone who has knows it’s a relatively short book…so I asked the professor in private why didn’t he asked the class to read the entire thing, it could even be read in one sitting or at most within a week, and he had given us 2 months to read only 4 short books of the work…he answered me with “if I tell the class to read the entire book no one will read it”, I remember thinking “so what? This is a university not a fucking social club just fail them in the subject” but I did not voice my opinion, that was the moment I asked myself what was I doing waking up at 4 am to be on time for college so I could spend my entire morning sitting still in a classroom that more resembled a high school than my idea of how academia was supposed to be like…I dropped out about a week after that.
:)) may I ask what did you do for living later? You are right, because the teachers themselves like methodology more than improvements and Truth....people love to think that their work is so valuable if it is like a slow motion picture where every single detail must be explained to the people with slower processors lol like a room where you can not.live but just observe . ANDpeaople behave like that in life later.....0 flexibility of the mind, only flexibility of Heart haha, change of heart is momentarily.
I did a lot of stock trading which is rather depressing to me, as while I was very successful at it is something I consider to be a lowly occupation that took a really heavy toll on my health for the three years I actively traded all day and lost sleep studying economics and the market, honestly I don’t recommend it and while i did made enough money to afford to not work a day job for a while the toll it took on my health at every level was extremely heavy, I am 22 years old btw.
hahaha oh man you are so young!!! I know I was doing the same only in institutional setting and I am twice your age lol. Btw it is hard to tell weather it was stress or COVID or both that took a toll on your health. Do not get discouraged if you really love it and not doing it just for money. You can scale back until you collect some experience! It is like tennis it takes 10 years to master the skill. Although S&P looks more like MAdoff fund than real free market lol
It wasn’t Covid and I mean the toll that the stress took on my blood pressure, I’m slowly recovering and sleeping better but damn I really didn’t had to go that hard in retrospect, also I don’t like any financier work I did it because I saw no other option, in a healthier time period I’d earn money more honestly through a military career or through farming and land ownership but that’s rather hard to do in this day and age, and my boomer aunt sold her part of the family farm to someone outside the family which made the place economically unsustainable and forced the rest of the family to sell that land that was settled and worked by my grandfather with his large cattle herds, I would like to once again state my hatred for boomers and their disregard for family legacy.
it is COVID young man! you can not know all :)) believe me!
military?? who are you going to fight for?? your corrupt deep state?? Ukraine! Jeeeez, stick to the trading! there is nothing dishonest in trading as individual, you can not rig the market lol
people are all corrupt, boomers are not worse nor better than the rest, do something you love, it will never be 100% enjoyment! that kind of work does not exist, but something where you will grow, it must be challenging.....this was COVID! 22 y high blood pressure, give me a break i was stressed and no toll on my health in your age , it starts only after the age of 30!
Well considering that my country and specially my region within my country did not enact major COVID related restrictions in any significant margin for more than two months(such as the closing down of gyms during this short period), and that I live a fairly active lifestyle complete with constant boxing and grappling training, I would say these circumstances were not, therefore, related to any major changes to my mental and physical health, but it was rather the stress of “needing to win big” and “overperform” which drove me into the pursuit of success in the market, and while there’s nothing particularly wrong with wealth in itself it does fill me with shame that I was unable to build my personal wealth with the creation of value or providing of a necessary and honorable service, rather than the movement of value through the system of commerce and finance, I find this specific pursue to be somewhat incompatible with my nature but nonetheless necessary for the building up of monetary assets in this current day and age.
I understand your confusion as from my fluency in what I assume to be your mother language I could be mistaken for an American or otherwise some other Anglo sphere nation resident, however I am ethnically southern European and have lived in South America from my birth although I have traveled through Europe as well as central, south and North America on several occasions and for several motives, as for serving the military notice how I stated “in a healthier time” this is in relation to the degenerated age upon which we dwell in which a military career offers little advantage and more importantly, significantly less honorable causes for enlistment or pursuit of a officers career, if I had been born in a different period I would have probably followed the path I almost did and pursued a degree in military sciences in my nations army military officer academy, or alternatively, would be in charge of my family’s farm which is now no more.
The “Open Exam” was already invented hundreds of years ago in China and is required to enter civil service. That’s why they have smart leaders and we have dumb ones.
True
Women are conformers. We self conform and enforce peers to conform to the norms of the day. It’s an innate female discipline which is powerful for building, maintaining or destroying a culture and society. It is coded in our biology as part of nurturing our own children to be safely integrated into the society.
The University system in particular is the ultimate example for women. But, it requires us to conform to society and reject our biology. Until we are willing to accept our biology and build our society around it we will continue to have painful consequences for men and women in the push and pull of the culture.
Well, not all, or at least, not all in the same ways--see the delightful exchange about norms between the characters Violet and Lily and in Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress.
"I love universities. I love the idea of them. "
Me too. When I read about what University and Academia are supposed to be, in the likes of Josef Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture and Michael Oakeshott's "The Voice of Liberal Learning". It makes me nostalgic for a University that I never really got to experience. Don't get me wrong, I had a great college experience, all things considered. I added philosophy as a major in addition to computer science. Computer Science I studied purely for its utility, but philosophy I studied for the sake of learning and the love of knowledge itself. I just fell in love with the liberal arts. I feel like few people understand the actual idea of a university. Those on the left who want to use it to advance ideology, and those on the right who want to just be a way to level up and make more money.
The Knuth, the whole Knuth, and nothing but the Knuth. so help me E.F. Codd.
After a lifetime of building houses, I got a masters scholarship and a teaching fellowship in poetry at well-known university, and though I later returned to construction happily, several aspects of my experience were ideal. This was around 2000, and all my professors were fanatically passionate about their subject, and deep sources of information—just their reading lists were invaluable. Also enhancing my experience was the fact that I already knew who I was, and what I wanted from the education—and it was not a job or a certificate. If this was an ideal situation, and it was for me, I think it says a lot about my experience in school from kindergarten to the twelfth grade, as you can imagine. And a lot too about my efforts to educate myself. Frost wrote well about this:
“Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by.
Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs
cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will
stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.”
All very true.
Fantastic essay. Gorilla's on pcp there's a image to ponder
That made me think of the lyric from The Day I Tried to Live from Sound Garden:
The day I tried to live
I stole a thousand beggars change
And gave it to the rich
"The old Latin collegia refers to any kind of voluntary association, but in the academic sense it represents a brotherhood (though always leavened with a few sisters) dedicated to the life of the mind, a secular (or not-so-secular) priesthood, the Brahmanical equivalent of the mannerbund. It’s elite but it’s no luxury; without it, we wither, becoming the grey goo mass that liberalism would make of us."
This, right here, is the true nobility that we're lacking in our modern day. The training of mind and manners, of virtue and vice, necessary to create a class and culture the the peasants can look up towards to emulate. That there should be people, who justly have a leisure of time, to pursue such goods and training.
Every Polis needs it, every culture has different outward embodiments of it. But, it is a good to have.
And, lacking it in, as you say, we wither into a gray, liberal goo.
The last bastion of the life of the mind in Academia is the driven students pursuing independent studies.
Independent/directed studies have a much heavier reading load and it's basically impossible to hide having not read. Only the driven students do them, and the connections from working with professors is how you get places. The good-old-boy system and letters of recommendation and the grace of God are the only things keeping a few lights on in Academia.
The Oxford model is 1 on 1 tutorials with professors. 12 to 18 person seminars can still work. Beyond that, there are folks who don't belong and they've got folks who do to hide behind.
My alma mater, as of next year, will not allow any course to run with an enrolment smaller than 30. It's not hard to predict what that will mean for the Faculty of Arts. The end is nigh. The thing is, it doesn't even upset me anymore. I'm at the point where I think it would be kinder to cancel the arts programs immediately rather than let them desperately flail and thrash for several years.
I can "me too" most of this as well.
I've been an academic tourist most of my life since a degree was already diluted back in the 90s when I came along. I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid and after spending a few years in the building trades, I returned through the community college system and then matriculated through the transfer programs. I dropped out of my English program because I sat in upper division classes as an adult and not a frat bro or Bob Marley fan and was able to read the social cues happening with my professors. I was also able to decipher most of them as having found and clung to a job that put them writing adjacent while having no idea how to make the leap between classroom and publication.
Imagine calling a plumber and finding out he's been teaching plumbing but never really done a field repair or an installation into rough framing?
The writer in residence one semester (or two, can't remember) was always busy working in his temp office, but he grabbed me one day in the hall after I'd submitted a story for a scholarship contest for which he was the arbiter. He quietly looked at me and said "You don't need any of this. These people are wasting your time. Just go write." That conversation was mostly because I had already learned the trade model of working and how it applied to writing. You have to write every day, but you also have to try and improve every day and hold yourself to a high standard. Hardly anyone did that in the team of folks "teaching" writing.
I got up in class and grabbed my stuff, maybe a week later after that intentionally quiet hallway conversation, and didn't return to class. I got a job in a factory so I could have a regular work schedule, and I wrote every single day. I went through a phase of reading those lame "be a writer" books and finally realized that was a scam too. So, I just bulldozed my way along.
I went back to Uni some years later after the market crash in 2008 to follow a science track since I stumbled upon an aptitude for Physics and Chemistry in my self directed studies. By then the University system was filled with now unbridled activist women and the "me too" thing hit. They decided they couldn't let a white male take a spot from _________ (name the protected class, any protected class) and deflated my grades to prevent me from being able to even apply for a Doc program I wanted to do. All while I was dragging the ringleader prof's undergrad sex toy girlfriend along through research methods and Anatomy as an unpaid tutor. The Girl Toy matriculated to the program I'd been eyeing because she was the right kind of student and got glowing recommendations from her prof girlfriend.
So, I talked to my lawyer, whose motorcycle collection I kept running, and he described it as "the state's attorneys will simply drag you along with emails and meetings until you're broke. You won't even get it in front of a judge for less than 100k, so just let it go."
I got up in class one day, picked up my stuff, and didn't go back.
I've managed to create my own ghost writing business, some of which are best sellers and most of which are top 10, out of the same model I ran successful trade businesses. I've done really well for myself without the University stamp. But now I have kids and I'd like for them to realize education matters in more than one regard as I'm teaching them to read, rite, and 'rithmetic. So, I crammed all my credits together and found a good online program where I didn't have to maintain the pretense of it being anything but checking a task off my list. In about 8 weeks I'll be graduating.
This forthcoming degree will make no difference in my income or my career arc because I've done all that myself, in spite of the insistence by Universities that they still matter. One of the fun little secrets of the publishing business is a lot of people in Ed. chairs take a lot of delight in writing checks to a guy who didn't come through the lit program at Vassar or Berkeley and can actually work. The people who grew up never completing a book also can't sit down every day and treat writing like a job. I can and do.
There are bright spots and people that influenced me positively in that educational journey. Many of my adjunct professors in Community College were the best teachers I've ever had. Truly, they were the polar opposite of the tenured whose true talent is the politics of ladder climbing and backstabbing while teaching was an odious obligation to be openly loathed. These were humble professionals who showed up to impart knowledge and help folks white-knuckling a second chance learn. In each of them I remember a bizarre kindness that contrasted with the ego driven indifference of the upper division colleagues.
If there were a retirement model where I could live on a decent campus and take classes with people my age, I'd do that too. I enjoy learning informally and formally. I very much like the group setting of classes with curious and effervescent minds who make insightful comments or pose provocative questions. I would pursue a Paleontology degree just because dinosaurs were one of my first interests as a kid.
My goal now is to expose my kids to the idea that education is a game you play so you can get away from it as quickly as possible with a credential. If we want to learn seriously, we have to be autodidacts and forget the system, or take advantage of emerging tech that can help us with structured learning at a self-regulated (but ambitious) pace. That's already begun with mine in preschool where they basically operate in a crowd control environment with rainbow pusher activists masquerading as teachers. Even now, post hurricane with no schools open, we sit down every day and work on letters, numbers, etc. whether we're going to school or not. When school reconvenes, we'll still be working on that stuff daily because the system at all levels can't be trusted to do a good job.
The biggest blessing of all the short sighted academics getting what they wanted is the emergence of the internet learning model rendering them useless in their credential forts. It's a delicious revenge that they have been rendered inert by their own insufferable yet predictable actions.
*sorry, this is stream of consciousness while I'm on my first cup so it's ragged and wandering*
All amazing stuff. In the US, in my state, residents over 62 can take classes in state colleges for free without the promise of credit. It would be nice not to have to wait that long, but I’ve had students like that in the past and I wouldn’t mind being one myself.
You can audit many private university classes without paying. I probably owe the University of Chicago a six-figure sum for the classes I audited. No one complained, ever.
Your commitment to learning, knowledge and education inspires me. Your politics don’t resonate with me, as I’m precisely the liberal, of the woke variety, that creates so much irritation to the right. But I can tell a love of learning when I see it, and I can honor it as well. Keep writing. Your voice is important
I spent a lifetime in colleges and universities (well, 10 years), collected four degrees, and never felt they were the bastions of learning you describe so lovingly. I probably went to the wrong ones.
In any event, the university system in my mind resembles the one you love and want to rebuild. I share your enthusiasm.
Interesting snapshot of your life. Sadness is present: a sense of what may have been just out of reach and now seems to be a shambles.
Those who love learning and thinking must stick together! Trouble is, they always have their noses in the books. Darn!
One day perhaps the money will drain out of academia and the only people who stay in it will be the ones that really want to be there Can't happen soon enough in my opinion.