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.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-22 10:37 am (UTC)It is totally not your fault that you live in a society that has tied your education to your future earnings. Learning anything for the sake of learning is great and being well-rounded is great and I definitely think that we should not dictate that people only educate themselves to make money.
But what else is great is being able to make choices about what you want out of life, whether that's having a boring well-paying job that makes you enough money that you can buy all the books in the world on what you're really interested in, or a job that pays peanuts for you to change the world, or a job that finds the sweet spot between being interesting enough to do all day and still pays enough that you don't have to worry about your financial security, which is what you seem to be aiming for.
So--I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with what you're aiming for. And I especially think it's cool that it looks like your area of interest is access to information, because more access to information is going to let people in the future have choices that you didn't have, as far as learning and money go.
tl;dr: I think you're great; I think that what you're doing, education- and career-wise, is totally valid; I think Ms. Thatcher can suck it, because studying ancient Norse literature doesn't have to be a luxury; I support whatever you choose to do short of, like, a heroin addiction, because see above re: you are great.
...here have a novel-length post, I dunno
Date: 2014-05-22 02:08 pm (UTC)The trouble is that society does tell us that education ought to be in the service of making money, at least until you have a bunch of that money. It's not as if you got this idea from nowhere.
But the other thing is that physical needs are needs. If someone is fretting about getting food, about being warm enough, about making rent, about how far each penny of this paycheck is going to stretch, it's REALLY REALLY HARD for them to scrape together enough energy and caring to be a good student or have fun side hobbies or read deeply about Norse literature. Of course it's possible, and people do it, but it's an uphill battle no matter how successful a one it is.
And, like, take my job. It's not really all that deeply personally meaningful. Yes, I work with great people, and I find interesting things in balancing the budget or being diplomatic or crafting a really clear email explaining a new computer policy to a bunch of professors who don't necessarily speak English as native speakers, but at the end of the day I'm an office administrator. It's nothing that requires a masters; I haven't done a masters, because I'm not going to go to grad school until I have a plan for what I'm going to accomplish with that grad school degree that makes it worth the time and the expense, because I'm happy where I am. (I enjoyed my undergrad studies; they were a 'luxury' thing, Middle Eastern Studies, but they also pointed at a couple of careers I could have gone into and didn't, because I decided that I would hate those careers. My job has absolutely nothing to do with that subject.)
You know why I'm happy, though? Because, yes, I can find interesting things in my job and I work with good people and it's not for an Evil Corporation That Eats Babies, so at the end of the day I go home and I'm not grindingly miserable and feeling my soul dribble out my ears. That's part of it, but that's not inherently sufficient. I'm happy because I finish work at 5:00, and then I'm done, and I can go and write stories and chat on the internet and teach dance (which nobody is ever, ever gonna pay me a living wage to do) and knit things and pet my cats and read non-fiction books about Norse history if I want, and I can do that secure in the fact that I can relax into these things because I can pay rent and buy food. It's the classic writers' day job. That's what a day job MEANS.
It wouldn't work for everyone. I'm not saying it should. I'm not saying you should be content with the same things I'm content with! I know people who are doing jobs they actively love, people who are in academia making studies of history or literature or whatever work for them, people who throw way more energy into their career than I would because that's a joy and a hobby and a paying job all wrapped up in one. That's awesome for them, too. I know people who would hate my job and would never be content to put in 7-8 hours a day doing office work to earn an evening free.
What I'm saying is that it took me ages to realize that I was and could be okay with this. That I was and could be okay with a job that was purely about the financial, practical, 'petty' side of life. Because I had it so ingrained that I was supposed to go to school, and study whatever called to my heart, and then somehow fall right into a career that I loved, a job that would stretch my brain and change the world and deeply fulfill me, and it would somehow mysteriously take care of the bills. It was gauche to think about the practicalities. The opposite of you, in a way. This even though my family was never really rich (though also never poor) growing up -- it's not that my parents deliberately instilled this, and in fact they've always supported us in workaday boring day job choices, but somehow I got the memo anyway. You Bright Kids, You Smart Graduates, You Can Change The World, Follow Your Dreams And Do What You Love And You'll Love Every Day Of Work, what do you mean you need to make rent? FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS.
Following dreams is important. Living with your feet on the ground and food in your belly is important. Finding the balance is hard, and individual.
If the terror is limiting your life, that's a thing to work on. If it's holding you back from things you really want to do, that's a thing to work on. If it's making you resent other people who've made choices you weren't encouraged to make, that's a thing to work on, for the sake of your own freedom from that simmering cauldron in the belly. But weighing financial consequences and risk into your decision-making -- that doesn't make you a bad person, or a small and petty one, or hopelessly ground beneath the ideological thumb of Thatcher and the Oh What A Luxury ideals. It makes you a sensible human being, living in the world and weighing all the factors one has to weigh to live in the world.
Me, I never want to stop learning. I want to learn everything I'm interested in, all the subjects that no one will pay me to learn, or that they'd only pay me for if I threw years into becoming an expert and launching myself into a competitive publish-or-perish world that I would, frankly, drown in very rapidly and miserably. So I learn them in my off time. You can still get a lot of satisfaction and a lot of cool stories that way. There are lots of options in this world, and they're all valid.
<3