re: #35 Decatur Deb

The joke is that all of that worked.

May I suggest that it “worked” because of you?

You found you way through life (and still are!)
You adapted whatever you needed from your formal educational process.
You examined yourself.
etc.

re: #38 Obdicut

What has struck me often about the party line (from Democratic Party speakers as well as education lobbyists and education professionals) is that somehow formal education is the door by which one must go in order to progress on in society and life.

Indeed, I was reading a NYT article which was a lamentation that only about 1/4th of the NY school graduates are prepared for college or a skilled job, implying that if not all children are truly prepared for college then somehow there is a great failure in society.

This is paralleled for example by President Obama’s implication that all children should be able to go to college.

My point is the world (by which I mean the collective of H. sapiens) doesn’t work that way, nor should one want/expect it to.

What they’re saying is that the jobs of those who wash your car, or repair your sewers, or changes the sheets at the local convalescent home - that these jobs are somehow irrelevant to society.

I think that is a flipped view of reality, and one packaged by certain politicians in order to sell some sort of fantasy.

My point is the baker at my local supermarket is doing every bit as honorable a job as the Ph.D. up at Scripps computing ocean currents, that the night-guard at the local Trolley station is doing a job as necessary to our society as the lawyer with his office downtown next to the courthouse, and that the sweet little-old-lady at See’s Candies who gives me an extra sample of chocolate cares more about me than my local politician with his JD degree.

Society is very much about pecking orders - something we all learn experientially throughout life. However, I find it disturbing that many supposedly societally-aware and critically analytical people want to enforce the following variant of the pecking order:

Ph.D.
M.D. (or other professional degree.)
M.S.
B.S./B.A.
***
A.A.
—-
HSDiploma
None of the Above

… with everything above the “—-” being the determiner or whether one has done their duty in our quest for the universal college-educated populace, and everyone below “***” as somehow second-rate as far as occupation.