|
|
|
FORGET THE B.A.
OK, fine, you got your liberal arts B.A. sometime in the last five years. What does that mean? It means that you've succeeded in joining the non-industrial proletariat. You're $5,000--$20,000 in debt. Your parents are worried about you. You're making just enough to get by. Statistically speaking, you're working in one of the following five job categories:
Or maybe, against the odds, you're relatively successful. If you didn't go back to school to get a more usable degree, that means you're working in one of the following fields:
If you did go back to school for more credentials you're probably in one of the following fields:
Otherwise, you're in graduate school, slaving your ass off to get a graduate degree which, if they ultimately deign to give it to you, might later on allow you to teach the same subject you're studying right now to misguided liberal arts fools similiar to yourself (but younger). Or else not, in which case you'll drive taxi. Your PhD won't let you teach in the public schools or work as a journalist. To do that you'll have to drag your overqualified ass back back to school one more time. If you look at the jobs listed, only school-teaching and journalism ever have anything at all to do with the things you studied in college. Law, public relations, advertising, political consulting, and even journalism usually involve sophisticated forms of deception and manipulation. Your verbal skills will be put to use, but in a way exactly contrary to the way you hoped to use them when you idealistically signed up as an English major. (Given the fact that liberal arts majors often have a very strong attachment to their own personal freedom, an amazing number of them also end up working in care centers, rehab centers, half-way houses, and other custodial institutions.) "But wait a minute! The BA degree is not a vocational program. It's for cultural enrichment!" That's all very fine, but do you really want to start off in life with a five-figure debt and working at $8.00 an hour? Cultural enrichment is fine for heirs and heiresses who will inherit the family business or marry money, but is it something to make enormous financial sacrifices for? In the first place, a lot of B.A.students slack their way through school skipping the readings anyway. In the second place, if you like to read, you can buy the books and read them on your own. The people who are giving you this cultural enrichment stuff are people who need you to study with them, because if you don't, they won't have jobs. If you and your parents have to make a lot of sacrifices in order for you to study with these guys, that's perfectly OK as far as they're concerned. Furthermore, suppose you do go to graduate school. You will go there thinking that now you'll be able to study the things you really love at a higher level, but forget that. You will find yourself continually pressured to narrow your interests and to conform your thinking to one of the handful of academic methodologies dominant in your school. If your English department happens to be dominated, for example, by the quantum tectonic paradigm, catastrophe poetics, and fractal discourse analysis, you goddamn well better get down with one of the three, or your chances of ever having a fulltime teaching job are nil. (And not only that -- if your department happens to have put its money on three losing horses, you could be SOL even if you do exactly what you're expected to). Some years back a sociologist friend of mine told me about a study of why people went to college. None of the reasons given (economic, cultural, etc.) quite explained what was happening. There were too many exceptions, and no matter how you cut it, some students ended up going to college for no apparent reason. His conclusion was that going to college after high school is an "institution" -- like marriage for example. And one of the definitions of "institutions" is that you don't have to give any reason for them except that "everyone does it". So is Zizka a know-nothing? Not at all. I spend most of my time studying liberal-arts-type stuff on my own. It's my substitute for TV. Books are one of the least expensive forms of entertainment, and if you've got a halfway decent library in town, books are free. There is really only one sacrifice you'll have to make if you read all the time: if you do that, you can forget about being normal. People will regard you with suspicion. More successful people will fear you because you're smarter than they are and are suspected of having a bad attitude. Self-made men and bitter, unsuccessful people will despise you as a failure. Slackers will avoid you because you're too serious and think too much. So you basically have to give up on all normal human relationships, but given today's baseline for normal human relationships, you may come out ahead on this. And if you ever happen to be invited into the home of a successful liberal arts graduate, you will have the pleasure of seeing their college books gathering dust on their shelves while they talk to you about their real estate, their hot tub and their yacht. My opinion is that the present situation can't go on. There are too many colleges, they're too expensive and getting more expensive, and too many people are hocking their futures for almost nothing. Too many talented people end up broke and angry. I think that there should be a more or less complete severance between enrichment education, which should be a lifelong process, and career education, which should be concentrated in the early years. Others may fear that, if this severance becomes normal, enrichment education will disappear entirely. I can't say that they might not be right, but I do not believe that the present system is viable in the long run.
Political stuff:
www.seetheforest.blogspot.com jjmrsnx |