schooling debate
By shag carpet bomb • Feb 15th, 2012 • Category: WGAF Filesthe schooling debate is fucking irritating.
the very people, like Miles Jackson, who claim that schools can make you critical of education seem to be advocating that, therefore, we can be morons and be completely incapable of understanding a thing that’s been said.
no one is advocating the abolition of education. sounds to me like they’d like to see the abolition of schooling.
similarly, the idea that schools address inequality makes me insane. TINA will invariably trot out some bullshit about how I wouldn’t be anywhere without schooling. Which makes me laugh. I have a good paying job and it has very little to do with my schooling in college. I mean, I’m actually working on making it have more to do with it, but I could have stayed where I was and made just as much. Meanwhile, the real point is: I’m a software engineer with a degree in the social sciences. I got a job because ravi told me to play around with blogs – as did Dwayne. I got a job b/c I wanted to know how to make myown web page. Stuff related to college and beign in colege. I got a job, also, because peole I knew from being in college – lbo folks – told me how to game the job market.
in other words, i’m here not because of hard skills but the very fucking soft skills that people point out, over and over again, are one of the mechanisms for which schooling ALWAYS matters to success in terms of occupation and income.: social networks, connection, who you know and not what you know.
nevermind the fact that it surely irritates that education supposedly fixes income inequality. not the kind i’m thinking of.
i mean, yay for me. good job. but what about all the other equally talented and hardworking folks i left behind, eh? fuck. what about my dad, for whom a two year college degree did nothing? (for which some lamer from lbo would probably quiz on his hard workingness or deservingness..)
no really. the fact is, there’s still a core of people, lefties one and all, who really do ultimately pin lack of job propects, etc. on the individual: lack of motiviation, etc.
TINA used to hint around in offlist email that I couldn’t find work because I didn’t hae enough self-esteem. Go fucking figure! Which is why every fucking time he tries to tweak me for being a smarty pants, I laugh. It makes me realize that he’s reaching real hard to score points in a debate. TINA also used to bag Chuck for not finding work, too. Oh, and then JB who, twice, chalked up my situation in life to the fact that I was paying off karmic debt.
yeah. no shit.
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A friend of mine, an academic, points out that the most annoying kind of left academic is the kind that thinks of the academy as being uniquely autonomous from and positioned to critique capitalist relations. Of course there are soft and hard versions of this. Miles’s version is almost cartoonishly hard. It’s hilarious that he can wax all Foucaultian about most things, but when it comes to education, he forgets all that.
What is amusing in the IT space is the how this pretence/pose is maintained after the end of schooling. All the highfalutin debate about programming languages, the complex terminology for simple problems that are almost always ultimately solved using brute force algorithms, etc, etc.