I've been reading one of the Russian lover's old textbooks on finance. Not that the Russian lover actually took finance classes. No, the Russian lover went to the School of Hard Knocks and Tough Shit, where one learns to run a business by being put in charge of it. To me this sounds like being pushed out of an airplane with nothing but a parachute. The Russian lover retorts that a finance education is like being pushed out of a plane with nothing but a brochure on how to open a parachute. He has a point.
Surveying the current economic crisis, people are lamenting about where greed has taken us. If it was only greed, I would be relieved. I'm afraid, however, that we are witnessing where America's education system has taken us. Greed in the hands of the few and mighty is not nearly so destructive as stupidity in the minds of all. The two together create the perfect storm of societal destruction. Hurray!
As a product of the American education system, I can confidently vouch that Holy Shit, We Are So Fucked. Never mind that there were students at university level who were functionally illiterate; it's what's being taught to the best and brightest, those with the highest potential, that indicates how determined we are to Epic Fail.
Being one of those that would rather read a book on things people do than actually do things, literature was a natural choice of study for me. It felt like cheating to be able to get a degree by reading and writing about Shakespeare et al. Even so, literature is not everyone's idea of a cakewalk and it does take a brain of a certain calibration to experience such esoteric studies as not only effortless but enjoyable.
To be fair, some of my classes were inspired and, despite their lack of utility or obvious application, I have no doubt they pushed my mind to be both more critical and creative in analysis. However, there were those classes which seemed determined to set low expectations and consistantly fall short of them. For example, a class I took concisely titled "The Novel." I anticipated studying an anthology of work intended to illustrate the development and evolution of the genre, and to attend lectures on the influencing historical, social, and literary movements.
Alas. The class would have been more appropriately titled "Twentieth and twenty-first century novels written by minorities and third-world peoples who loathe Western culture and perceive it as a brutish imperialistic force with lasting negative effects." Or perhaps, more creatively " 'Why my thatched hut and bowl of rice is better than your loft apartment and marinated filet' -- A Survey of Third World Apologetics Novels."
Not that reading such works is a bad thing, and in my leisure time I probably would have ended up reading more than a few of them. But I felt a little salty about paying (by current standards, a fairly modest) twenty thousand bucks a year to read a bunch of paperback employee picks from Barnes and Noble, and then be manipulated into culturally self-abasing class discussions.
All this jerking off to the disenfranchised was not only not helping anyone; by passing itsef off as their education, it was helping to put students on a path to future disenfranchisement. Maybe in the not so distant future, it will be Russian or Chinese kids rolling their eyes at inspiring fiction written by the now-destitute middle-aged white Americans who were college educated in the early twenty-first century.