At the risk of being all Kleinheider all the time around here, I couldn’t let this post slip by without saying something.
Kleinheider says:
Funnelling a bunch of folks who cannot extract any real value from the experience does not result in them becoming smarter or more successful, it just gives them a piece of paper.
We need to direct our people towards the amount of formal education that will be most useful to them. That may not mean college or it may not mean college at the “appropriate time”, we should not fret over this. Life is not a competition.
The four college degree has become in essence, the 13th — 16th grades. In the end, that does not benefit the people attending college or society as a whole.
Isn’t it something how as more folks get the opportunity to go to college, we start to hear this idea that there are some folks who don’t need college, for whom college is of no benefit, folks who cannot extract any real value from the experience?
Just who are these folks?
I’m just going to be honest with you because I feel like shit and I’m dizzy. I hate this shit because no one has the balls to just come out and say “Yeah, B., those folks are people like you. The people you love and care about? They don’t deserve the same shit I’ve got because you all are a waste of resources.”
A college education is no guarantee of a better life, but come the fuck on! Just come on. How in the fuck are folks supposed to make a better way for themselves without it?
How many high school graduate children of high school graduates do you suppose are members of the Belle Meade country club? How many high school graduate children of high school graduates do you suppose are living in tony suburbs parking their SUVs in the garages of their McMansions at night?
College is not about literally preparing you for the job market. College is, and always has been to some extent, about training you for a middle-class (or higher) existence. Here’s where you learn how to read and write like an educated person (i.e. middle-class), here’s where you learn what to read and what’s worthwhile to write about. You make friends, some of them will be successful and they become your network, the people you can call on when you need a job or a favor or a campaign contribution or whatever.
It is nearly impossible to move yourself up a class without this knowledge. You must look and sound like you belong before you actually do. Where is one supposed to get this knowledge along with the irrefutable credential that one has earned it except for at college?
To start some nonsense notion that “not everybody needs a college education to get by in life”? When you are a fucking bloody capitalist pig? Talk about self-serving.
Let’s just continue to be honest. Capitalism depends on there being poor, desperate people. It’s built into the system. The system doesn’t work if there are fifty bosses and one worker. It’s got to be a triangle with there being a few really wealthy powerful people on top, and then a few more less wealthy, less powerful people beneath them, and so on down the pyramid until at the bottom you have a whole lot of poor, powerless people doing shit tons of work the people above them have enough money and power to opt out of.
That’s how it works.
There’s only so much room at each level and the game is rigged to make moving between levels seem simple and do-able while, in real life, it’s very difficult. Again, a college education is no way to guarantee that you can move up, but it is one of the few ways that’s plausible for most people.
We like to believe that capitalism=meritocracy, that the market will insure that the best people rise to the top and are rewarded. But the truth is that bosses depend a lot on smart people who aren’t ever going to be bosses. A lot of work in this country gets done by people who are too smart for the jobs they have, but don’t have a way out of those jobs.
I could start naming names right now of all the folks I know who are too smart for the circumstances they find themselves in. Many of you are reading this right now. Life is not fair; it’s not set up to be fair.
And for these fuckers to come along and whip up this idea among 18 year olds that college isn’t for everyone? That’s just a further injustice, another way of guaranteeing that bosses will have employees too smart for their circumstances to exploit.
It’s dishonest to pretend it’s anything else.
For real people, the surest way of improving their lives is to go to college.
To suggest that some folks have a better idea than those individuals who it is that can benefit from college?
Well, let’s just say I don’t want to hear from Kleinheider any more about liberal elitism.
Tiny Cat Pants 