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Do I Need to Know This?
Sep. 2nd, 2006 05:19 amEx-Lemmingworks. ##.
Do I Need to Know This?
You can survive without the things you learn in college. People survive scrounging out of dumpsters and sleeping in doorways. If you want to talk about quality of life, we need to be a bit more demanding.
Professor Dutch has this quote an others on an interesting page that Buridan shared with me; probably in the hopes that i’d blog it.
Top Ten No Sympathy Lines is a typical sort of rant that I’ve heard over the years by ‘old school’ profs who like to maintain the fiction that university is a rare and special place where students are afforded 4 years of an opportunity to grow and learn in a challenging ivory towered environment. He’s not like that, I’m just saying that this is where I’ve heard it in the past.
I’m someone who struggled to do well in university; working though most of high school and all of university (except the summer of 1985 when I went to school full time). I have sympathy for students who have to work, as well as sympathy for people with children to take care of, bills to pay, special needs that require extra support. I’m using the larger meaning of sympathy that is beyond mere pity.
I think that university has become more than an elite learning environment, just as it is a de facto requirement for anyone who wants to get ahead in life.
That said, Dutch’s page is full of intresting truisms and unproblematized statements, reflections and whatnot that are for me useful reminders of the challenges students and faculty face when sharing the experience of doing university.
All I Want is the Diploma
The work force is full of people who do the minimum necessary to get by… For people who want to get by on the minimum, there’s a reward already established. It’s called the minimum wage.
