>On Feb 6, 2011, at 5:33 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> >> If it weren't for the schooling, where would you be? Probably poor,
> isolated, and confused.
> >>
> >> Doug
> >
> >
> > Maybe you should have counted to ten before pulling the trigger on that
> one.
>
>I don't see why. I'm tired of listening to all these highly educated
>people dismiss the value of good education.
>
>Doug
You've known me for years - since freakin' 96 fercrisakes. I've never once dismissed the value of knowledge - and btw, most of my education was me reading on my own. I've learned more on this list than I learned in all my years of formal schooling combined. Even in my weird hippy dippy college, I could have skated. The deal was: there was much rigor as you wanted there to be. At a base-level, there always had to be more rigor in a place like that. How many normal college students have to submit a plan for their college course work and defend it in a 20 page essay substantiating why they've chosen the courses they choose?
None of what I said has to do with dismissing learning - in whatever context it takes place. And since I spent a lot of my political life figuring out ways to build opportunities for such learning without relaying on formal schooling.
Learning, knowledge, reading ... these are all wonderful things, in and of themselves. That clause is not a throw-away. They are ends in themselves, not means to radicalization. Treating knowledge as a means to an end - now that, I find, tragic.
and btw, I'm sure I've told this story before, but when I was in high school, I dreamed of being some skirt-suited, briefcase carrying member of the Wall St. class. Had I taken that scholarship, had my parents not split up and had my dad not gone bankrupt, maybe I would have gone to some elite liberal arts college as planned, and joined the ranks. I'm pretty sure, at that age, and absent the experience of watching an economy explode during the 80s, I would have more than willingly gotten some trader job on wall st., putting my critical thinking skills to the awesome purposes of fucking over the rest of the world. shag
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