Of education
May. 22nd, 2014 06:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnyI read something today that broke my heart a little.
Thatcher went, ‘What are you studying?’ and the girl said, ‘Ancient Norse literature.’ And Mrs. Thatcher went: ‘Ooh, what a luxury.’
And this wasn’t pointed up as meaning anything, but it does mean something. What it means is that the Prime Minister attached no intrinsic value to knowledge of another culture, or of the past, or of its language. And its a cliché to say, but you understand the modern world through its echoes in the past.
- Stewart Lee
It broke my heart a little because I've internalised it so much, and I truly hate that facet of my character.
I mean, I'm pretty sure you know by now that I feel there's a lot about my character to hate, and carefully filtering through that to separate what is genuinely awful and what just feels awful, and what can be changed and what can be accepted, is a difficult and painful and constant task.
This is genuinely awful.
I have massively internalised the fact that education is about financial gain, and that's how my choices have been guided. It's rhetoric that has been fed to me my entire life, and it's only recently - now I'm doing a masters - that I've actually looked this belief in the face.
(I try to do that, to look my beliefs in the face, but one of the problems of moving around so much is that it takes a while to get to the deep conversations, and most times I don't have time to get there. It's harder without people to bounce off.)
I can be pretty bitter and resentful about what people study because it is an expensive luxury thing - and that's the part I should be questioning, ffs - and I can be pretty bitter and resentful about what people study because I never chose what I wanted, particularly, but instead what I thought I'd be good at and what I thought I'd need to be employed. Which is probably why I am such a very mediocre student.
I'm not saying I haven't loved what I've studied - because learning is learning, and learning is fucking awesome. But my motivations have mostly been an inherited terror of being poor, and that terror has limited my life in many ways, and made me absurdly constrictively risk averse in what I study, and what I do, and how I live.
I don't really know how to be any different, but I really bloody want to learn.
Thatcher went, ‘What are you studying?’ and the girl said, ‘Ancient Norse literature.’ And Mrs. Thatcher went: ‘Ooh, what a luxury.’
And this wasn’t pointed up as meaning anything, but it does mean something. What it means is that the Prime Minister attached no intrinsic value to knowledge of another culture, or of the past, or of its language. And its a cliché to say, but you understand the modern world through its echoes in the past.
- Stewart Lee
It broke my heart a little because I've internalised it so much, and I truly hate that facet of my character.
I mean, I'm pretty sure you know by now that I feel there's a lot about my character to hate, and carefully filtering through that to separate what is genuinely awful and what just feels awful, and what can be changed and what can be accepted, is a difficult and painful and constant task.
This is genuinely awful.
I have massively internalised the fact that education is about financial gain, and that's how my choices have been guided. It's rhetoric that has been fed to me my entire life, and it's only recently - now I'm doing a masters - that I've actually looked this belief in the face.
(I try to do that, to look my beliefs in the face, but one of the problems of moving around so much is that it takes a while to get to the deep conversations, and most times I don't have time to get there. It's harder without people to bounce off.)
I can be pretty bitter and resentful about what people study because it is an expensive luxury thing - and that's the part I should be questioning, ffs - and I can be pretty bitter and resentful about what people study because I never chose what I wanted, particularly, but instead what I thought I'd be good at and what I thought I'd need to be employed. Which is probably why I am such a very mediocre student.
I'm not saying I haven't loved what I've studied - because learning is learning, and learning is fucking awesome. But my motivations have mostly been an inherited terror of being poor, and that terror has limited my life in many ways, and made me absurdly constrictively risk averse in what I study, and what I do, and how I live.
I don't really know how to be any different, but I really bloody want to learn.
