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.

[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

[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.

[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...;)

[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:)

[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)