> Joanna, you have a PhD, right? Do you regret having one?
No. It impresses the hell out of people and I loved every minute of graduate school, compared with what came after.
> Do you think all those years of education made you better-equipped to
> cope with the world and make a living?
Yes. But most of the reason why has to do with what I studied and how I studied it, which mostly got me in trouble in academia and made it almost impossible to find a good teaching job. I became better equipped to cope with the world despite the aims of my educators.
> Isn't education a lot more than a "huge justification for
> inequality"? Why take such a hostile, reductionist attitude?
Of course it is. But I know a lot of smart, capable, knowledgeable people who cannot make a living wage, not because they can't do the work they want to do, but because they don't have that piece of paper. I don't mean to be reductionistic, but I hate the way "going to college" has become synonymous with having a right to more than an equal share. Haven't you noticed how many of the working-class genius movies have to do with how getting an education is equated with abandoning your working class family and friends?
Education is a wonderful thing, but it should not be used as a cudgel or a justification for social inequality. The reason why people cannot make enough money to live is not because they haven't got an education, it's because they have no power.
If every person in the U.S. had a college degree, many would still not be making a living wage.
> Apropos Cde Cox's original point - what if the capitalist class's
> short-term greed (i.e., being too cheap to finance mass higher
> education) undermines their long-term interest in having a skilled
> workforce?
But they're setting things up so they don't need a skilled workforce. They want, as much as possible to deskill work so as to have maximum control over workers and so workers have maximum contempt for themselves. They decided a long time ago that stupid wage slavers are politically much safer and more manipulable than truly educated people.
And then remember, having a degree does not mean that you're educated or civilized. It does mean that you're trained to accept the authority of those who granted the degree and that you're trained to accept what you were taught -- that white people are smart and freedom loving; that the free market is the best possible system; that this is the best country in the world, etc.
ravi, help me out here, tell everyone about why having a brahmin caste is a bad idea.
Joanna
> Are the capitalists always right? Aren't there supposed to be
> contradictions in the system, even by orthodox Marxist lights? Isn't
> this an aspect of O'Connor's second contradiction?
>
> Doug
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