I don't get it

[maevele]

when educated people are pig ignorant about lives other than their own. Do they just not know anyone not just like them, or do they just not pay attention? Because I am a dropout. I should have an excuse to be ignorant. and sometimes I am. I don't have formal training in critical thinking, or other's cultures, or any of it. So if I can see how your educated, sophisticated intellectual ass is hanging out, what's your excuse?


I guess it must be either only knowing people like themselves, or not paying attention. If it is the first, how does that happen without *trying* to recuse yourself from the "others?" Are most people's surroundings much more homogenous? Is madison wisconsin some extreme example of melting pot diversity? I'd think just being at college would have given these people a chance to interact with people who are not just like them in all ways.

And if it is the second, how do you get by in life without noticing the lives of other people around you? Do you only ignore those different from you, or everyone? And how do you fit in to the world around you if you ignore so many people?

Is there some complexity here that explains why my alleged "betters" don't get other people?

Comments

[owlectomy]

(1) Because of the sheer size of most colleges, it is pretty easy to treat them as Big High School, where the purpose of your social life is to find the people who are most like you as quickly as possible and just stick close to them.

(2) College is, in part, about socialization into a particular (middle-class) way of thinking that can tend to narrow your experiences more than expand them.

[jesse_the_k]

Those so-called "betters" put much of their effort into imagining the world as full of people like them. IOW, they're constructing elaborate tunnels that prevent them from perceiving the world's diversity.

No, really, I'm an eyewitness. I was a child of the ruling class. I watched my classmates being indoctrinated in the wonderfulness of their way of life, the importance of the strict mores of their social circle, and the bedrock truth that their good fortune was due to their inherent worth. That sort of thinking prevents kids from perceiving those around them. I was lucky to be exposed to different viewpoints as I participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

[polemista]

Oh, I wonder the same thing, but what owlectomy and jesse_the_k said makes a lot of sense to me.

[naomikritzer]

It's definitely not that Madison is some melting pot of fabulous diversity, unless it's changed a LOT since 1991.

To throw out a theory that occurred to me as I was reading this: I think in some cases college actually increases people's intellectual defensiveness. Being wrong is "punished" in college (with bad grades) so being told "you're wrong" feels like a big deal. Meanwhile, at college you learn all sorts of shiny tricks to prove how not-wrong you are, which you can whip out in an attempt to intimidate people into admitting that actually you're right, and if you've do this a few times and it works (for values of "works" that may in fact include the other person throwing up their hands and walking away from you), that's positive reinforcement and so you keep doing it.

In theory, college should teach you to respond to intellectual discomfort by examining your assumptions, but in practice, that probably doesn't happen all that often.

FWIW, college did give me the opportunity to interact with people who were not just like me, take classes about people who were not just like me, etc. My most educational experiences in terms of diversity (again, FWIW; I'm not going to hold myself up as a paragon of righteous virtue here) have involved living abroad -- when I was 13 and spent a year living in London with my family, and when I was 21 and spent a semester in Nepal. Those were some of the most intensely educational experiences of my life, period. My mom has taken this to heart and as a professor she leads a trip abroad pretty much every year. And the stories she tells about just how narrow a comfort zone some kids construct are ... really mind-boggling (like, she had a kid complain about the weird exotic foreign food he was being forced to eat when the group had dinner at a restaurant that specialized in pot pie. POT PIE. EXOTIC AND FOREIGN. WTF??!??)

Sorry for the rambly post; I need to go finish making a birthday cake but I will ponder this some more.

[naomikritzer]

After "FWIW, college did give me the opportunity" please insert a sentence about how I'm not sure how much I learned from the experiences in the classroom. HOWEVER fortunately for me I lived abroad, which was super educational blah blah etc.

GAHHHHH I need to go bake a cake.

[benet.livejournal.com]

My late father, God rest him, was very fond of saying "You've never really met a twit until you've met one with a Ph.D."

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I guess it must be either only knowing people like themselves, or not paying attention.

IMHO it's both.

Are most people's surroundings much more homogenous? Is madison wisconsin some extreme example of melting pot diversity?

Actually, in my experience, moderately sized state college towns (esp. those with a large international student population) are seriously melting-pot diverse in a way that a lot of communities aren't.

[kynn.livejournal.com]

education isn't designed to make you a decent human being, sad to say

[maevele.livejournal.com]

but you'd think just being at a college would mean you interact with people not just like you, right?

[kynn.livejournal.com]

lol no, honey

and interacting doesn't mean you learn or listen or care

[maevele.livejournal.com]

I still don't get it then.

[kittikattie.livejournal.com]

some people know or learn just enough to think they know everything about everything, then stop at that point and progress no further.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I know many a Ph.D. who are anything but twits, as well as the ones who are. Can't generalize that way.

Love, C,

[idiomagic.livejournal.com]

Organized education is very much the same as organized religion of most flavors: you are not encouraged to question the wisdom granted from on high.

When anyone thinks they already have all the answers, they won't question or look for alternative theories or beliefs. In fact, they seek out people exactly like themselves, with the same opinions, because it reinforces their belief system and their smug belief in their own rightness.

What I learned in college is that being able to regurgitate information and kiss ass appropriately does not equal an education...a college degree only means that one is good at taking tests and catering to the egos of instructors. And this is from a girl who had three degrees before age 20...;)

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Don't forget that the neocons have paid very large $alarie$ and many other perk$ including actual employment with large $alarie$ and health in$urance, and even publication of books underwritten by thinktanks and other in$titution$ funded by those they $erve. They have been providing college education and funding to the grave to these so-called intellectuals since Nixon.

This is why liberals, progressives, etc. are poor, most of all, don't own the media. Because the media is owned by those others. But liberals haven't funded themselve. Look at what a disaster Air America was -- the answer to rush limcheese. The Huffington Post? That's what there is. We are not funded by our own. We're often not even respected by our own. We're always told to do the work for the 'exposure,' as if intellectual and creative work works like the mumps.

Love, C.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

My experience at college was that _I_ interacted with people who weren't just like me, but that most of the kids there were white upper-middle class folks.

'Course, I went to a private college.

I think Naomi is right; college is supposed to help you develop critical thinking skills, but what it more often than not does is teaches you how to cover your ass and 'sound smart.'

I was very unusual in college and in grad school in that I was willing to ask questions that exposed my ignorance (and in that my dad was a mechanic, but perhaps that's a subject for another post). This gained me a very bad reputation amongst insecure people.

But if you can't expose your ignorance, you can't get RID of your ignorance, and if you expose your ignorance online and people point it out, if you're an insecure person you feel you have to try to defend yourself instead of treating the experience as a great way to rid yourself of a particular ignorance.

Sadly, insecure people are 99% of academia. I fucking hate academia.

Perhaps that should have been my subject line. I feel like it's set UP to prove that people in academia are superior to everyone else either morally, intellectually, ethically, and intellectually.

Which is, of course, a pile of rot and couldn't be further from the truth.

Also, most academics live in white, upper-middle class enclaves. My neighbor across the street is an exception, but he isn't white, either. Or Christian.

I am sorry; I am rambling. I think I am still very, very angry with Moon, and with academia in general.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I meant to add that the students themselves often don't experience this diversity, though. Going to college vs. living in a college town.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

I don't think benet was saying all people with Ph.D. are twits. I think s/he was saying that if you want to meet a SPECTACULAR twit, meet a twit with a Ph.D.

Am I right?

[benet.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah... it wasn't meant as an all-Ph.Ds-are-twits statement, given that Dad had one himself and (as a prof) worked on a daily basis with other people who did. The idea was more that education doesn't save you from being stupid, and also it can sometimes give you the means to be stupid in new and different ways that you weren't previously aware of. :)

[benet.livejournal.com]

Yes, thanks. Well, I mean.. that's what Dad was saying, anyway.

[seeksadventure.livejournal.com]

I'd think just being at college would have given these people a chance to interact with people who are not just like them in all ways.

Definitely not. This was driven home at Michigan in particular, and not just that law school was filled with mostly similar people but that their undergrad experience included basically only interacting with people just like them, the same way they were doing at law school.

Even if they were exposed to people somewhat different, they didn't seem to realize it, especially when it came to class differences. They just automatically assumed I had the same background they did and couldn't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that I was their classmate and yet my parents weren't rich, they hadn't gone to college (hell, Dad didn't graduate from high school, though he later got his GED), that I'd worked through high school and university and the four years I took off between undergrad and law school, etc. They only saw what they expected to see and what they expected to see was people just like them. (A lot of this is passing as white and white privilege, of course.)

Not all of them were like that, but a lot. I'd go so far as to say the majority.

I actually think higher education makes things worse, in some ways, because they attend schools where they can isolate themselves and never experience any life but the life they already know.

[meleth.livejournal.com]

The key is very careful self-segregation. You surround yourself with people who are like you, you remind yourself that you're the status quo (and since you're a normal person, you must be, right? It's not like you eat caviar off silver dishes or burn crosses), and then you avoid situations in which somebody who matters might tell you that there's more in heaven and earth.

It helps to include Hamlet references in your lj comments. Frequent references to Western canon help to establish a normative cultural idiom:)

[meleth.livejournal.com]

BTW, my time at UVA has in no way made me bitter about academic myopia and privilege, not at all.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

What...pot pie *is* exotic from the right starting point. ;)

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

I will say that I think I agree with your dad. My own experience with Ph.D.'s, of which there has been much, has been that they definitely put a LOT of effort into being twits and do a spectacular job (when they are not being nice, reasonable people who just happen to have Ph.D's, like plenty of academics -- in fairness).

I've met many uneducated twits, too, of course, but they don't have the same appallingly condescending pseudo-intelligent swaggering babble that makes for a really, really delightful twit.

IMHO, of course.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

THIS

[naomikritzer]

Sure, but this kid's starting point was Minnesota.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together at The Cafeteria?", white kids' version. Essentially.

Some people go to college for the broadening experience. For a lot of other people, it's just high falutin' trade school. Go there, take the tests, get the sheepskin, get out. Make connections along the way, join a frat of people just like you, etc. Especially if they're homesick.

Oh, and feel like you're being really hip and transgressive by doing that. Because you're *resisting* the "groupthink" of "liberal PC bullshit".


...and, at the risk of inviting WS in - it's a cl*ss issue, too.

[stoneself.livejournal.com]

probably related to the denning-kruger effect (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64.2655&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Arthur Hlavaty once startled and amused me by reporting that as a child, he'd believed that black pepper was something that people put on food to punish themselves. His people thought of salt as an extreme seasoning.

[stoneself.livejournal.com]

the more you know in one area can make you think you know alot in every area. xkcd touches on this (http://xkcd.com/793/)

[naomikritzer]

OK, this puts me in mind of a story from my years at college which I think illustrates part of the problem.

This happened at one of the workshops on the day of the town's Take Back the Night Rally. I can't remember how I wound up at this particular workshop, but it was about class, and it was more or less a consciousness-raising session, run by a grownup (i.e., not one of the students). What I remember was that there was one young woman among the students at this workshop who was a student at my college, and who was POOR. Really, really poor. And she started talking and couldn't stop because it was like, FINALLY she was somewhere that someone was going to understand her.

She said, "It's so isolating. My friends will ask me to meet them at the snack bar and I say no, I can't, I have no money. They say, oh, just get a cup of coffee or something! and they DON'T GET IT because when they say 'I'm so broke!' they mean they only have a hundred dollars left in their checking account and when I say I have no money I mean I have NOTHING. Not even 50 goddamn cents for a cup of coffee."

I remember this very clearly because I was absolutely one of the clueless people she was talking about. I couldn't spend money like water but I could certainly order pizza if I was hungry at 10 p.m. And absolutely I had friends who could not, but my privilege, and their lack of privilege, had been COMPLETELY invisible to me prior to this point.

In part, I was clueless because the college I went to makes some effort to minimize the class distinctions (in a good way) -- all on-campus activities are free. You can see plays, concerts, movies, athletic events, etc., without the need for spending money. They have a no-car policy that is not super well enforced but discourages the more show-offy sort of rich people from coming. But, also, acknowledging these class distinctions was (and still is) stigmatized.

So. Although my college did strive for diversity, the pressure to conform combined with the uniformity in experience created by a small-college environment meant that a lot of the time, there was this illusion that everyone (no matter how different their background) was basically just like you, for values of "you" that were white, middle class, etc.

There were opportunities to experience the full diversity of the campus but they were easy to avoid, if that's what you preferred to do. We did have a diversity requirement for our classwork, but I'm pretty sure you could fulfill it with classes that let you learn about diverse people who'd been dead for centuries. Also, in a classroom, discussion tended to be focused on the material. Occasionally it would tread into personal territory, but that wasn't something professors could orchestrate or demand.

[naomikritzer]

(And I hope I don't sound like a Sh*tt*rly sockpuppet for bringing up class -- this story is just a good illustration of how an area of privilege was rendered largely invisible to the students who had this privilege. Race, obviously, was visible, but the same set of dynamics helped to create the illusion that we were all exactly alike even if we looked different.)

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Yep, definitely Dunning-Kruger Effect and reinforcement of the status quo; many people feel that if you've finished college and done well on tests, you are automatically a Cultured Intellectual Person, so their insensitivity/lack of perception is never visible to them.

The other thing is that it was my experience that my fancy college aspired to admit people from all over the world and from all racial and ethnic backgrounds and from all socioeconomic strata, and did, but that the campus culture was so strongly flavored by white, middle- and upper-middle-class, native-English-speaking, mainline Protestant/Catholic/very assimilated Reform Jewish, US Northeast, post-graduate-degree-required profession having people that it was more of a melting pot than a mosaic. You came in with a bunch of people with wildly different life experiences and you left with a bunch of people who subscribed to The New Yorker and listened to NPR.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

My experience of college and view of it at the time was that college was supposed to give you job training where applicable and a piece of paper to help you get said job.

High school is where you are supposed to learn critical thinking. College is where you learn to write like people actually write for publications (or you are supposed to anyhow, I think U.S. colleges fail in this regard) and where you study more advanced topics in your chosen field by it academia, medicine, teaching, linguistics, foreign service, math, etc. Oh yeah, and you learn time management.

The things I learned about other folks came mostly outside the classroom. The classroom itself did include some interesting learnings and readings I wouldn't have otherwise encountered and interesting, adult discussions that couldn't be had in high school, but that wasn't really part of my goal as such.

The workload I experienced as High School part II (now with more independence!), but that's because we did blue book essays and other things at my high school that most folks don't do until college.

I did not learn how scholarship and publishing worked until I studied abroad at Edinburgh Uni my junior year. U.S. college is a failure in that regard. You are expected to figure it out yourself.

Anyhow, college can have a point to it, but it depends on the subjects you take.

For many it's just a hoop to jump through to get to the next hoop.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

Must have been where you went. I only had tests during math and science classes, and those tests had a point to them. The rest of the classes required papers, non-regurgitation variety.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

That could be it for some.

But at this point college is so mundane, that I am not sure it's even thought about by these folks. 53% of Americans have attended some form of college. Even my students' parents are getting their GEDs from the local community college and then going on to get Associates (I'm an ESOL teacher).

I think what gives educated people the sense of entitlement and the attitude is *not* the college. Plenty of folks go to college and don't act this way. I think it's really other factors (such as class) in their lives that have also led to them being able to go to college, but I really don't think it's the college education itself. I think they came that way. :)

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

"I've met many uneducated twits, too, of course, but they don't have the same appallingly condescending pseudo-intelligent swaggering babble that makes for a really, really delightful twit."


You never met my grandfather or my stepfather then. They are the distillation of blowhards. They also demand you LISTEN to them. And they the demand you ARGUE with them. They went nutz when I refused to engage. They were so stupid I couldn't stand it. My mother really blew it when she divorced my dad to marry somebody just like her own father. Which, cheap psychology, says it all, I guess.

Love, C

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

Actually, from the sounds of it I HAVE met them. Numerous times. :-)

(The 'delightful' was ironic.)

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

I think this entire conversation is about class -- about how maevele is wondering why people who put on such middle-class academic airs about tolerance and largemindedness are intolerant and smallminded.

WS only uses class to prevent people talking about other stuff. You weren't doing that, not remotely.

Either way, let's not let WS own 'class,' okay? There's a lot to unbundle in class, especially as per this convo.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

THIS so much. Just because I roll my eyes whenever this one individual brings up class, doesn't mean I roll my eyes whenever issues around class are brought up otherwise. It's a legitimate issue, or as you say, bundle of issues.