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As a recent college graduate, I suppose I’m supposed to feel some kind of nostalgia for my youth, freedom and lost opportunity for endless mental expansion. I suppose I do, in fact, feel this nostalgia. At my graduation, my grandmother told me that everyone looks back on their college experience and has regrets; that they should have taken more courses, or studied harder, or gone to more parties, or asked out the cute boy in English 244, or whatever. While I definitely have things in my past that I am not proud of, I would by now stretch of the imagination call them “regrets”. Looking back on college, I know that I took a very unorthodox path to self-fulfillment and self-discovery, and while it was, at times, extremely hard, extremely lonely and extremely fraught with doubts and despair, I don’t think I would have changed a thing. This, however, is not my point. My point is that I was lucky to have the experience in the first place.
A friend of mine once told me that college is where you “have a chance to fail in a safe environment”. I think that this pretty much sums up what college is for. After all, everyone fails at some point, and usually it is during the first attempt at something. If you fail in a so-called “safe-environment”, then it is easier to learn from those mistakes. Everything in college is a mock-up, a test designed to seem like the real world, but isn’t. It’s all a trial run. If you fail, find out what you did wrong so you won’t screw up the real thing, plus you master the skills needed to overcome future tests and trials.
What did I fail at? I failed to disprove the assumptions that lead to elitism.
If college is meant to give you a safe place to fail, does that mean that those who don’t go to college are set up to fail for real? Or, do some people fail before they even get to college? In essence, are we obligated to give everyone a college education, a so-called test-trial at life?
Check out this article in The Atlantic, (or at this link): In The Basement of the Ivory Tower, written by Professor X.
The article reeks of elitism. It drips with it. Settled not-so-subtly in between the lines is the belief that all cops are dense and those who attend evening classes are automatically failures. However, by the end of his argument, I get the feeling that I am the elitist one by assuming that everyone is society should aspire to a a certain level of professionalism.
Here is an excerpt:
“America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.”
This college is no different than other college; it is a safe place to fail. However, failure at these colleges means something much different. Failure at “the bottom of the ivory tower” might actually be a death sentence. If you cannot get through even this low level of educational pursuit, how can you possibly ever hope to advance any farther in life than your current station, (both intellectual station and career station)? What’s more, this failure might not even be your failure! It might be the failure of society to provide quality public education for all children in America, not just those who live in rich areas, where property taxes on their parent’s and neighbor’s million-dollar homes give them access to better funded public schools.
I think what bothered me about this article was that there was no acknowledgment that these people could not rise above mediocrity (although, who is to say what mediocre is? But I digress…) because they were never given the tools from the start, and instead blames it on a sub-par mental capacity and wasted opportunities.
“Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. ..
Some of their high-school transcripts are newly minted, others decades old. Many of my students have returned to college after some manner of life interregnum: a year or two of post-high-school dissolution, or a large swath of simple middle-class existence, 20 years of the demands of home and family. They work during the day and come to class in the evenings. I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work…
Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading “Araby” or “Barn Burning,” their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?”
He attempts to tone down the elitism with a few sentences about how he is the same as his students, how this is his second job, how he struggles to meet ends meet as well, blah blah. But, as much as he tries to hide it, I think this is the point that he feels, even if he doesn’t come right out and say it:
Not everyone should go to college, because some people in our society are born to be lower class. Why waste time trying to turn them into something they are not?
This was a statement I have struggled against throughout my college years. I attended an Ivy League university, where a sense of entitlement was almost a requirement to get in. We all knew how elitist we were; it’s just that 99% of us didn’t care. I did.
I remember believing that everyone could achieve, given the right tools. I thought that if we had a fair society, where everyone had a great kindergarten teacher and parents who loved them, we could all, theoretically, be Ivy League students. The thing that I learned, after 4 years of “research” into this theory, was that I was sadly mistaken. Many people are lazy. I’ve seen good friends of mine waste opportunity after opportunity and sink into a tedious existence from which they might never escape. I’ve ended relationships over this realization. I now believe people are more likely to achieve given the right initial tools, but now I also believe that those meant to achieve will achieve no matter what. Real achievement is overcoming odds, my research taught me, and perhaps that is why I’ve inadvertently created so many odds for myself…so I could feel as though I’ve achieved.
I think that there are two truths; some people are just meant to be mediocre, and some people are forced to be mediocre. Some people are just plain lazy and stupid, and choose to live what society deems a “lower-class” existences of their own volition, and some people live that way because they really, truly faced odds that could not be overcome.
The worst realization of all is that there is no test-trial. College may give you a safe place to fail, but failure can come long before you even hit 18 years old. If you’re lucky enough to make it past your teenage years, you might have worked hard enough to reward yourself with 4 years of safe harbor. However, making it to college is not enough. As we say in the music biz, “You’re only as good as your last hit”. You gotta keep those hits coming if you want to keep your head above the water. If you’re not willing to swim, then you drown. Some people have lead weights, and some people just get tired of paddling, either cause they give up or cause they just never were strong enough.
In the meantime, I will always assume first that Professor X’s students had lead weights rather than brushing them off as quitters and weaklings. I will continue to believe that a more socialist world would probably be a better one. But, I will not deny that some people just don’t have it in them. I don’t know if this makes me elitist, or if those who believe that everyone can and should be a winner are the truly blind elite.
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So we all know CNN is a crock of shit. The top story on today’s news was how the media may be biased against Hillary Clinton. I’m sorry, but how pretentious is it for the media to concoct stories about itself? Can’t they focus on the REAL news (yknow, like the man who lost his wedding ring and recovered it in a pawn shop a week later, or the scraggly dog who pulled some scraggly kid out of some lake. Yes, all real stories). Perhaps I’m being too harsh, and human interest stories are always inane. CNN’s coverage of politics, which focuses on whether or not Obama wears his American flag pin enough, is clearly the height of journalistic excellence. Meanwhile, most of America still does not know that Honduras and Serbia are no where near each other (once again, this example comes from real life.) I’d like some real news please.
The answer to my prayers. Please support this!
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So, while perusing some XPN album reviews today, I stumbled upon a favorable one from the new artist Santogold. This post is not about her, because I have not listened to her music yet. Instead, it is about the inspiration for her name: an 80s infomerical.
Seriously. This is amazing. Here is the link AGAIN.
Who ever decided that making an infomercial for both bad-quality gold jewelry and a science-fiction space wrestling movie called “Blood Circus” is officially my new culture icon. There is even a music video!
Not only is Santo Gold an infomercial and an emerging XPN darling, but he (it?) is also….another musician.
www.santogold.com
I smell a lawsuit. Thank god I’m going to law school.
