Teachable Moment

Hopefully this stubborn kid has learned a valuable lesson that will serve him well in the real world:  there are multiple layers of faceless, mindless bureaucrats whose sole function in life is to enforce rules, without regard as to whether they make sense or not, whether they add any value or not. Accept what you are told, do it without question, show your belly and let your masters decide whether to scratch or punch that belly.

Be honest -- for 99% of you out there, no matter what you do, that is the common undercurrent of your lives, no? Do what you're told, and maybe someday a bone might be thrown your way. Probably not, but you can't take that chance. Any honest commencement speech will include some variation of that something to warn the kids about the manifestly unsafe space that awaits them. Grab your ankles and hold on for dear life.

First World Problems

I guess this is a sign of just how far out of the loop I am on some things -- swear to the sanctified pasta soul of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I was entirely unaware of the phrase "trigger warning" until today. Frankly, I wouldn't mind being still unaware of its existence and use; it still makes very little sense, and I'll be goddamned if I can figure out what value it might add to the pursuit of an actual life.

Even though it's the norm rather than the exception, it never fails to amaze how many people act as if it's their inalienable right to spend their entire lives without ever being offended, without ever having to actually listen to someone with an opposing viewpoint. I don't mean the usual onstage back-and-forth jabber of talking points posturing as debate, but to actually listen, and disagree, and assess the situation afterward, and decide if that disagreement merits an equivalent response, or is something to vote against or write or speak out about.

Of course there are many things in this wicked world that all of us can and should speak up about when the opportunity arises. Societies where women are treated like property, bloggers are beaten in public, adulterers are stoned or beheaded, or any number of awful things going on right here at home.

It just seems odd that in a country whose economy is mostly rackets, whose criminal justice system is a cruel joke, and so on and so forth, that seemingly intelligent people would rather choose to police subtle grammatical inflections, bandying words such as "cisgendering" and "othering", words which have zero practical utility outside the walls of academia.

Maybe this ankle-biting type stuff is just what they think they can win, if only by attrition and the fact that most people will just back away slowly from some stranger trying to strong-arm them over their mansplaining. It's not that there isn't some truth to the complaints about the nature of the white male heteronormative power structure, it's that this sort of nanny-policing tends to have a polarizing effect -- it's only going to work on people who are inclined to agree with it in the first place, and will drive everyone else further away, because of its nagging nature.

But then, that's been true of political discourse in general for quite some time; when was the last time you heard of someone "converting" because of something they heard or read? Virtually every ex-lib-turned-con has some self-serving road-to-Damascus story about The Man over-taxing them, over-spending, letting criminals off, etc.; while people who change in the other direction do so because their job got outsourced around the world, they got shit-hammered into bankruptcy by a usurious medical bill, whatever.

In my first go-round in college, right out of high school back in the '80s, I found the campus political correctness folks to be somewhat annoying, but generally harmless, and more or less willing to stir the pot. Which should be the idea -- you come from where you're raised with a certain outlook, and go to a place where that outlook gets challenged, in good ways and not-so-good. Pure ideologues are the ones you need to watch out for; most sensible people are generally syncretic, whether or not they realize it.

Going back to grad school in my early 40s was the exact opposite for me -- since nearly everyone in our weekend-warrior MBA cohort was at least 30 and had some sort of career, they tended to be more conservative, with the couple of 20-somethings being even more conservative. But we all mutually understood, without having to explicitly say so, that it was okay to see the world and its issues differently from one another. We could engage in principled disagreements without having to worry about someone getting "offended". (Then again, while there were some women in the cohort, everyone was still part of the white heteronormative paradigm, so there's that.)

If the "microaggression" concern-trolling serves to at least create some small measure of awareness and tolerance on someone else's part, great. The more likely case is the kids get out into the real world and have to find a decent job or three in a depleted market, and realize that university is about the only place in the world where any of that stuff has any traction.

Words With Friends

When it comes to pedantic arguments over "correct" usage of this or that word, I tend to be something of a fence-straddler. I personally know and use the right word in the right manner, because I regard them as tools with specific functions. Just as you wouldn't use a screwdriver where a wrench is called for, why would you use "literally" for an analogy that is clearly figurative, or even fantastical?

However, as a practical matter, correcting someone on their incorrect usage is off-putting, a clear dick move. They are not going to learn from your noble example. Save your time, and your reputation, and move on. I recall seeing some fluff Sunday morning show piece about a couple of guys who would go around to restaurants and "help" them correct their menus, usually over misspelled words or misused apostrophes. Life is just too short.

The "literally" thing actually makes a small bit of sense to me, because there's not really a common-usage adverb -- aside from "figuratively" itself, which might be somewhat unwieldy in a casual conversation -- that conveys the figurative nature of the exaggeration in question. We know that the speaker's head did not literally explode, and yet it's scarcely worth the trouble to point out that that word does not mean what they think it means. They know, that just happens to be the handiest word at their disposal.

Now, I'll admit that I take a breath when I see the aforementioned misspellings, and especially the misused apostrophes, because the rules on those are so simple -- possessives, not plurals. Writing "ect." (or saying "ek cetera") is another peeve, because "et cetera" has a literal meaning, an actual function. "Should of" instead of "should have", that sort of thing. Approached as tools with functions, these things are not at all complicated.

But habits -- especially bad ones -- form through inattention and lack of caring. This is what the corrective pedants, well-meaning as they are in their quest to preserve the care and feeding of our noble, evolving language, may not quite get. People use "ect." and can't get the correct "your" or "there" homophone because they don't give a shit. By definition, correcting someone who clearly couldn't care less will not correct the mistake, but merely annoy that person.

Back in the chat forum days, I had several lively discussions about this subject with professional academic linguists, people charged with the mission of identifying, classifying, and organizing the various phonemic and grammatical constructs of languages. As a kid, I was fascinated by a variety of languages, and gained at least minimal competency in most of the major European languages.

The more you learn about language -- especially one as widespread and multiply sourced as English -- the more you realize that it is never static, it's a river that flows slowly but flows nonetheless. As with political systems, the outcomes of languages are frequently a result of a large enough mass of users who don't know or care to understand the nuances of what they're engaging in. They deploy it to convey their own immediate use, and some of it will accrue habitually. The more they read and/or write, the more competent they will be in hewing to convention, as one might imagine.

And that, ironically, is where preservationist linguists fall short, imho. It's easy to understand the impulse to chronicle and archive one of the thousands of dying languages around the world, spoken only by a dwindling group of elders in a remote village. But that impulse contradicts what we've noted above, that languages evolve with use. A dying language, by definition, is no longer one that is being used. It is intellectual lepidoptery to stipulate that a language that is dying out precisely because of its lack of use and interconnectivity has any utility, beyond capturing the oral history of the remaining few who speak that language.

In the end, the pedantic attention to upholding the simpler and more obvious conventions of language comes down to cash in many instances. I've been on plenty of hiring panels, and thus reviewed hundreds of résumés over the years. And I can tell you right now, when I encounter a misspelled word or a misused apostrophe on a cover letter or résumé, I don't bother correcting jack shit. I don't have the time. It just goes straight into the round file, I won't even bother to finish reading it.

And I'm far from the only one; I have heard and read plenty of hiring managers say the exact same thing. Ultimately what it comes down to is whether or not someone can be bothered to pay attention to what they're (as opposed to their) doing, and if they can't, hiring managers won't waste their time with that stuff.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Part Duh

One might at least creatively, rhetorically, make the argument that certitude is not bulletproof and absolute about, say, how precisely the universe "began," or the exact process by which species of biological organisms have developed over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. I wouldn't want to bother to engage in any sort of intellectually honest "debate" with such a person, because right away their motives would have to be in question. But it's at least theoretically conceivable that a person could raise some (again, intellectually honest) questions as to the specifics of such theorized processes.

But there's no excuse for this, there's no rationalizing how a grown-ass adult, even if English is not their first language, cannot understand how the sun appears in the east every morning, and disappears in the west every evening. We are supposed to be beyond the times where we told ourselves and each other various stories about that process. There is no chariot, pulled by celestial beasts and driven by a heroic mythical demiurge, laboriously towing the giant golden ball across the sky in slow motion day after month after decade after millennium.

As easy as it would be to drum another cynical eye-roll about how stupid these "1 in 4" are, this pseudo-statistic (and while I believe that 2,200 is too small of a sample, any contingent is still too large, on a subject like this), larger questions are begged, if we pull back far enough. One question we might ask, in the context of, say, "who the hell is educating these people, and how?" is what we expect our educational system to do, in the most general sense. In other words, if we expect our archaic Prussian model to merely churn out compliant workers, people who dutifully vote and pretend it made some difference, then hell, that's what you got. Keep on keepin' on.

But if we harbor notions of "greatness," however one chooses to define that, whether "continued" or "restored," we have to revisit that model, and its extenuations, accordingly. For one, even if we did decide we simply want our compliant-worker-drone model, one must ask, doing what? Considering the factors of overpopulation, leveraged comparative advantage in emerging markets (that is to say, cheap labor in overpopulated Third World countries), productivity gains (accruing primarily to owners, almost completely at the expense of labor), automation and commodification of routine tasks, and hypermobility of capital, the irrefutable issue facing Americans is the cold fact that there are simply more people than there are things for them to do to secure a living.

So what do you do with them, what do you "teach" them in the institutions of learning, the highest of which have devolved into a naked racket, a system of indentured servitude where one rolls up six figures worth of loans, and scrambles to pay them back down, in 10-15 years (of their prime years of life) if they're lucky (and they frequently aren't)? What is to be expected of such an "educational" system, frankly, when there are fewer and fewer options for them as employable drones?

I observe the experience of my daughter, who is in seventh grade, and I can only wonder, what is the point? To take but one example, her math class is something called Common Core. There is no textbook, only a series of worksheets that comprise the homework. "Notes" are taken in class, but for some reason are collected afterward by the teacher, presumably to show the accrediting body that notes are being taken.

However, as any of us who have learned a new concept already know, things like notes and textbooks are useful for reference, a way to preserve those oh-so-valuable experiential moments in the classroom for future study and guidance. It is a persistent assumption that those experiential moments cannot be replicated by the mere hunting and compilation of data, that there are interactive and interpersonal dynamics that must be internalized to attain true educational self-actualization.

There is some truth to that assumption; there are experiences in bonding, socialization, and team-building that are difficult or impossible to transfer to a wholly online paradigm. But again, a live interpersonal experience that mostly involves the mindless ticking of boxes, without understanding how the process of learning continues apace, becomes, while not completely valueless, certainly a process with diminishing value. Rather than instilling a love and appreciation for the edifying experience of learning a useful skill or idea, one learns how to navigate a bureaucratic maze posturing as a learning institution; instead of mastering a concept, one learns how to pass the test.

So we have to decide, at some point, probably when it's too late, that we would rather not be a society that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, that while the things we can optimize and quantify and goal-seek on a spreadsheet have and add some value, they do not comprise the entirety of that value. They do have some value, don't get me wrong. But we have been misled to believe that it's the be-all-end-all, the ultimate goal of the process. And in a world where the knowledge is free, if you know where to look for it, if we can pull up a Khan Academy or Academic Earth video and learn something cool, what the hell are we going to "school" for, and worse yet, paying for an experience that has less and less meaning and value?

Back to School

Like I keep sayin', the American higher education system is a racket now. Pass it on.

Credentialism

So I finished my final MBA class this past Saturday. I still have to complete the directed internship, but the project is already mostly done, I just have to compile some survey results and make the pitch.

It's been an interesting two years, to say the least. I went in with two and only two goals for attaining the degree:

1. Open more professional doors. As I will turn 44 in a few days, it occurs to me that my career path needs to be more, shall we say, solidified, lest I meet the standard American working class dog's fate of working till the day I drop, leaving the cubicle farm feet first, a life by definition less than fulfilled. In other words, time to shit or get off the pot, professionally speaking. Until I start pulling down at least high-five/low-six figures, jury's still out on that one.
2. Gain more knowledge, of how and why things work, of specialized areas, of where to refer when in need. Really, to put it in somewhat Rumsfeldian terms, to learn more about the unknown unknowns, the things about which I didn't even know I didn't know. This goal was attained much more closely than the first one, because of the trade secret of the MBA -- you don't have to memorize everything from every class you take, every factoid that's pumped into your head, you just have to recall where to look it up for reference.

Of course, there were other valuable lessons, most of which I already knew but were reinforced with various degrees of vigor. The textbook industry is a goddamned racket, from author to printer; your instructors, while chock-full of the bien pensant sentiments one would expect sinecured academics to be flush with, are still susceptible to the same strains of peer pressure and business expectations as any of us in the real world are; you are handed rote ethical nostrums to dutifully recite, as if they were the bidnessman's Hippocratic Oath, without the rich context the ongoing shenanigans in the financial sector so abundantly provide; you need to memorize and regurgitate, and speak extemporaneously on the matter -- whatever it may be, balanced scorecards, Porter's five forces, why EVA is infinitely more important and useful than EBITDA -- as if your very life depends on it.

Most of all, what is reinforced is a rather unique arrangement, where you are both student and consumer, a role somehow both inherently subordinate yet festooned with Important Surveys on how well you enjoyed your extraordinarily high-priced product. It is a very strange business model, perhaps unique -- just as the insurance industry is the only major business model that is predicated on the company not providing the service for which it has already been paid, so the post-secondary edumacation system is the only model that caters to you even as it pushes you around.

It's been an enoyable experience, the way I assume a triathlon is for its participants -- it's an accomplishment just to complete it, really. But from the start, despite my goals and high-handed sentiments about the process and quest for knowledge and value -- something I still believe, for myself at least -- I have always thought about the subtext of the first goal enumerated above.

This is perhaps the biggest racket of all in the university system, this idea that a piece of paper is so incredibly valuable that it trumps all else, and thus is worth paying a couple years' wages (if it gets you the job it's supposed to, a tenuous proposition at best these days) for. And the truth is, it is and it isn't -- there is value attached to that piece of paper, so long as its holder realizes that there are people with nothing more than high school diplomas doing the same job just as well.

And really, now that I know where to look, and what to read, and with all the free resources on Teh Intartubez, I can tell you right now that the knowledge is available for free, or for less than $200 worth of books anyway, so you really are paying the big bucks for the credential.

I knew this from day one, to have it confirmed is alternately frustrating (because I still have to pay for the privilege) and comforting (because even with my worst assumptions about people and things, I love being proven right, which I always am).

All that said, it's been a fun ride. I love the library, I love the campus and the energy of it. I can see why some people never want to leave. But in the end, I do think that once the health-care battle has been more adequately addressed, it may occur to folks that granting more accessibility to higher education will lead to better macro outcomes in a rapidly crumbling society. You can't keep gouging kids at every turn, and expect them to just want to keep "getting ahead", especially when more and more that just means for them a decade or so of student loan repayments.

On the Other Hand

Previous rant aside, I am absolutely loving the MBA thing. Everything about it is all kinds of awesome -- the curriculum, the campus, the locale, the students, the library, the ginormous new rec center. Most importantly, the idea of keeping the ball rolling. I've felt for a long time that a major cause of cancer is stress, but I'm starting to believe that another one is inertia. I actually do pretty well at avoiding both in my life. It's been a pretty sparse month for posting, but it sure as hell hasn't been dull. Between work, school, family, etc., it's a blast.

The Purpose-Driven Statement

Been winding up my statement of purpose for grad school, and I guess it's an indication of how much of the process I was unaware of, that I had no clue about this part of it. Even websites devoted strictly to that goal, didn't know they existed.

Why does anyone fork over another twenty grand and two years of their lives? I mean, duh. To learn more, to add more value to their skill sets, to bring that to the table where they work and make more money, blah blah blah. I felt like being a smartass and calling it a "Statement of Porpoise": I am not a dolphin. Oh, the grad-school comedy that can be mined there.

Am I telling them anything they don't know? Of course not; it's about the process itself, and how you can bring your personal experiential style into it. But it's also a huge industry unto itself -- the applications process; the test-taking companies; the $120 textbooks; etc. As with health care, education seems to be something that the Euros got right, and Americans tend to get soaked for.

But all in good cause, I suppose, as this should give me the leg up to be upwardly mobile at a job that I am enjoying immensely and seem to be pretty good at, thus providing more opportunities. This state may be going to hell in a handbasket, but it's got some distance to fall before it approaches about forty-four other states that immediately come to mind. There may be a better, more productive, more equitable, and ultimately more fruitful way for American citizens to get a post-secondary education -- and then turn around and utilize that for their own and the common weal -- without going into hock for the following decade. I'm just sayin'.

But for now, I'm really chomping at the bit to get this party started come August. The statement is polished, the app is done, next week is the GRE and onward to the financial aid funhouse. Good times. It's going to be an interesting summer.