To the Sister of the Greatest Girl in the World.
It came as a slight surprise to find out that my comments about college actually upset you. And now that I have probably irredeemably offended you, I still offer these words of explanation. In this attempt to clarify my position on education, college, and other related matters, I do not plan to retract my statements in some sort of ingratiating apology or self-effacement. Instead, I plan to explicate the origins of my opinions so that you might better understand my apparently awful point of view. But, before I begin, let me readily admit the likelihood of my thinking representing casuistry, and that to take me too seriously admits the same thing about yourself.
------
Like many things in life, school falls into the category of unexplained common sense. By saying that I mean that it exists as one of those facets of social life so enmeshed into what makes up society that the reasoning behind its existence never gets elucidated. I feel that that last sentence failed to explain that well enough, so please excuse me while I try again. Maybe "unexplained common sense," my own terrible phrase, will actually make a little sense with an example.
Take the notion, present in most societies, that murder is wrong. A person can say, "Murder is wrong," to the vast majority of people alive in this world and not have to explain why: it will simply be accepted as if it's common sense, as if it's an inevitable human assumption--most people will not ask you why murder is wrong, they will nod in agreement. Now, while not challenging the correctness of the notion of murder being wrong, I do argue that statements like that one, ones accepted as common sense without ever getting explained, constitute potentially dangerous, misleading thoughts. For instance, although no one who desires the moniker of sane would argue against the barbarity of murder, that assumption, when looked at, only seems to apply to individually sanctioned murder in America. Many Americans actually take pride in how effectively their country kills other nation's denizens via the military. Simply, but truthfully, anyone in the military is a hired killer. That goes contrary to the societal law against murder but war remains a crowning achievement of the American government. Also, in the form of the death penalty the government allows murder, allows it and actually funds it. I see these contradictions forming in part because of the pitfalls of unexplained common sense. Without making it unequivocally clear why murder is wrong, people can act, on a philosophical level, in glaring opposition to standard societal precepts without any challenge to their behavior because most people do not know any real reason why murder is wrong other than things like, "Just because," "It's the law," "God says so," "It's just wrong," or any other similar non-reason reason. Working off of an unexplained common sense tenet, e.g. murder is wrong, permits all kinds of contrary actions to take place since no genuine explanation exists to properly challenge any contradictions that might arise. When contradictions do come up it ends up making things horribly confusing and ostensibly irrational, like how it doesn't make sense that murder is wrong but war and the death penalty are okay. It ends up looking like the statement accepted as common sense might not be so common sense after all.
Okay I must stop with my bad example that feels like it has no forward movement. Thank you for reading through that (that is, if you did read that), for I now wish to return to the original topic: school. Ah yes, I now know why I even wrote that last block of writing. School, like the concept murder is wrong, is something assumed without explanation to be a benevolent presence within society. Phrases like, "You can't get anywhere without it," or, "It's the only way to get ahead in life," follow closely behind the hallowed entity of the classroom. Those phrases with their extremely lofty claims seem designed to inure one against the realities of the system as I have never intuited anything that noble while in school. Left to myself, to my own perceptions, I highly doubt if I ever would make any claims like the aforementioned ones. Never have I felt why those claims should prove true and never has anyone ever properly explained to me why they should. No explanation was ever given to me as a child nor as an older child. Definitely not as a child does anyone ever tell you why you have to go to school. It all occurs as a mandatory action, something imposed upon you by adults. Criticism for that I do not necessarily provide, I merely wish to state that the lack of reasons shown to anyone who attends school about the attendant assumptions concerning its goodness assuredly makes school a phenomenon in society taken as common sense, rarely challenged foundationally. Since the education system requires one to discover its worth on one's own it begs to be doubted, for its platitudes to be questioned and challenged. And while I attempt to do that I cannot ignore how impoverished most people I have come across are in having substantial reasons why school matters. Take our conversation for an immediate example. I asked you where your very positive attitude towards school came from and all I got from that query was the knowledge that you had to go to sleep. Moving away from yourself, most answers I hear from other people center around economics, on the importance of education in giving one the means to make as much money as possible. I do not know what I expect school to do, but to turn it into an entirely mercenary affair does not resonate with my unstated expectations. Occasionally I hear reasons for why anyone should go to school that center around the cliched adage "knowledge is power." That particular saying, while quite hackneyed, I can agree with. However, when did school become synonymous with knowledge? Knowledge and intelligence comes from something not related to school; education is an intrinsically individual process, surely helped by interaction with other people, but almost entirely self-motivated and internal. School does not teach anyone anything, it shows one what to learn. The benefit of going to school is in having the resources available for learning but the drive to better yourself with learning comes from an instinctual motivational drive with the demands and obligations of a teacher sometimes even hindering learning. But the concerns I expressed to you had nothing to really do with the value of learning, more with the money spent on schooling and the difficultly of the dealyed gratification of school.
------
Okay, I have now lost my purpose in bringing up all those things. What I really want to say is that my ambivalent comments about school come not entirely from my stupidity but also from the my having to decide the meaning of school for myself. For me it has never been obvious how great school is. I mean, even now, even in college, surrounded by people much more intelligent than myself, I cannot stop feeling occasional uncertainty about the benefit of my schooling. From what I understand, you believe that the benefits of going to school should be so obvious that it takes some type of mental blindness to not notice it. Hey, maybe you have a point. If I stop to think about it I notice that I have never had much of a problem with school. I have always done decent there; it's the only place where I have actually had some consistent success in my life. So why do I ever say anything disparaging about it? Well, I usually don't but the offer made to me caused me to think about my education more than usual.
Consider what was offered to me: a chance to make $100,000 immediately after getting out of college or after getting licensed as a stock broker. But also consider that I turned it down. Yet, even though I turned it down, I cannot help but make stupid comments about how foolish I was to do so. I am an English major with little chance at making such wealth, and I decided in the end to continue with my education, to go after my bachelors in the seemingly useless subject of English. I say useless only in the sense that it will most likely not prove remunerative like other majors but I do not really find it entirely useless for I picked it over my first chance at money; I like English more than any other subject, I care about it, I would want to study it on my own if I wasn't enrolled in school but I also try to stay practical about money as without it no type of quality life can I look forward to. I tease myself about the major because I do realize that the major looks foolish to most people but I am taking a chance on it, on English and on my foolishness. Look, I'm sticking with my major, I enjoy my major, but at times during the year I cannot not say to myself, "Why the hell does it matter how plot contributes to the themes of a story or what post-modernism is or how to identify a passage of Yeats while other people are actually doing something that immediately benefits society and are going to be paid for that in a way that allows them to live enjoyably?"
I don't think anyone could really tell me why English is important to study on top of the necessity for reading and writing skills, but it's okay, I have accepted that and I will find out on my own. I know that even when English looks like the most pointless, irrelevant thing in the world I would not really feel better studying anything else. When I started college, my first fall quarter, I only had science and math classes and I was miserable. Once I took English classes my Winter Quarter I had an immediate change in attitude and started enjoying my time. Well, I do not feel like I have said anything meaningful in all these words--I apologize if I have not really made anything clearer or said anything different from what I first said when we talked. Do not mistake my idiotic comments for my rejection of everything good in college and education. Please understand that while I make many naive, inane statements I am staying with my education, I know the value of bettering oneself with knowledge and with study, but I feel it my prerogative to feel ambivalent about everything if I find it appropriate.