Friday, April 15, 2005
While that stupid cat is absent--
Sorry you can't see your favorite hellspawn right now, people. I tried to talk about this in a previous post, but Tomkyou kept butting in. Anyway, the issue at hand is COLLEGE. I swear, even when I was a sophomore in high school, I felt like I didn't want to be in college. Now that I'm a sophmore in college, that feeling still lingers with me.
A blogger who I really admire (yet, whose convictions I don't always share) observed that most people these days who are in college really aren't meant for college. That may sound politically incorrect in this day and age, but when you consider how much "easier" it is to get vocational training for a job that can make as much (or even more!) than your typical academic, and consider how many choose the academic career path over vocation for the most irrational reasons, you can see his point. I am of the school of thought that scholarly pursuit should not be about money, and that those who see college as a career mill are better off getting a real damb job rather than waste parents'/taxpayers' money and time.
Where do I fall? Somewhere in between. Science has fascinated me ever since my freshman year in high school, yet I derive no pleasure from the drudgery of lectures, midterms, and the rest. Does anyone remember when academic pursuit wasn't so damn institutionalized, and the object of it was discovering the True and Beautiful, rather than a six figure salary/tenure/publication? Yet nowadays students like me are nothing more than automata who must go through the motions, say all the right things, and take all the tests lest we (God forbid!) drop out and find a real job. Whatever happened to the American dream, that an uneducated person, in less than a decade, become quite successful? Have people become so mired in their comfort zones that they are suffocating, that they cannot find a different path to freedom than that which all the "experts" prescribe?
Anyway, I got a stupid midterm for which I must study. I guess I'm getting emotional over that, but even before the quarter started, I could help but say to myself, "God, there must be something better than this."
A blogger who I really admire (yet, whose convictions I don't always share) observed that most people these days who are in college really aren't meant for college. That may sound politically incorrect in this day and age, but when you consider how much "easier" it is to get vocational training for a job that can make as much (or even more!) than your typical academic, and consider how many choose the academic career path over vocation for the most irrational reasons, you can see his point. I am of the school of thought that scholarly pursuit should not be about money, and that those who see college as a career mill are better off getting a real damb job rather than waste parents'/taxpayers' money and time.
Where do I fall? Somewhere in between. Science has fascinated me ever since my freshman year in high school, yet I derive no pleasure from the drudgery of lectures, midterms, and the rest. Does anyone remember when academic pursuit wasn't so damn institutionalized, and the object of it was discovering the True and Beautiful, rather than a six figure salary/tenure/publication? Yet nowadays students like me are nothing more than automata who must go through the motions, say all the right things, and take all the tests lest we (God forbid!) drop out and find a real job. Whatever happened to the American dream, that an uneducated person, in less than a decade, become quite successful? Have people become so mired in their comfort zones that they are suffocating, that they cannot find a different path to freedom than that which all the "experts" prescribe?
Anyway, I got a stupid midterm for which I must study. I guess I'm getting emotional over that, but even before the quarter started, I could help but say to myself, "God, there must be something better than this."
# posted by Ingemar @ 2:54 PM 
