Alonetown
One dude’s perspective who doesn’t know you and who is probably inferring way too much from your hint-y writing:
You’re afraid of being alone and, maybe even more perversely, you’re afraid that your fear of being alone is going to keep you alone. Maybe not alone as in no one will hang out with you, but alone in the more important sense.
Expecting happy endings
Advocating devilishly: What if my expectations of happy endings are a survival mechanism that, paradoxically, keeps me something like “happy”? What if giving up the belief that all my struggles and confusions and fears are just plotlines on the way to a bigger and better future would in fact send me spiraling into a smaller and shittier present?
The problem with revolutions
But to ask people to perceive reality as complicated, where we don’t in fact have full control over our fate, where villains and heroes occupy not only the same institutions but the same bodies, where “good” and “bad” are a bit squishier than we are comfortable admitting, is kind of asking a lot, isn’t it? In other words, why should we ask people to be “realistic” about their potential for causing revolutionary change when asking them to do so is asking them to confront something a bit more troubling than their capacity for revolutions? Look at you, David, you’re out here asking us to be realistic but you’re bumping up against our fundamental unrealism. I don’t know whether to call it a “need” or “unrelenting desire” or “evolved psychological survival mechanism” or whatever but there’s one thing I do know: Whatever the hell it is, I’ve got it and I’m pretty sure you’ve got it – it just may not show up until we step away from our keyboards.
David Foster Wallace and the way education works
A student is someone who (or whose parents) gives up money, time, and/or some level of freedom to (presumably) learn. Yes, education is a commodity: unavoidable.
Is packaging “learning” into a *rule-based* commodity what’s wrong with education? Would the goal of learning be more effectively achieved if education was treated more as a create-your-own-syllabus sort of deal? That’s one theory. The reality, I’m guessing, is much more complicated.
I don’t think I’m disagreeing with you – in fact, I rather liked this column – I’m just saying that whether or not the syllabus is rigid and militaristic is just one tiny element of the many things that could possibly affect learning.
Where I will disagree with you is here: If education is going to be “solved,” even at the margin, then the place to look for solutions is in all likelihood the cranky over-analytical types just like DFW.
WARNING: This Degree May Make You No Better Off Financially
Cigarette-like warning labels is one idea. I’ll toss out another, more perverse one: A credit-score like assessment of the likelihood that schooling will be financially valuable to you, personally. I’d bet that given certain variables we can pretty creepily accurately predict the likelihood that someone will (a) manage to graduate, and (b) conditional on that, have their degree be worth a damn.
That feels a little morally deviant, doesn’t it?, giving someone a raw number of what amounts to something like their future “success” probability? Maybe even more damning than the ethics is the fact that it probably wouldn’t change behavior much, simply because people tend not to be terribly convinced by such numbers.
And so I come back around to the cigarette-like warning labels, but not just a textual statement: we need to show them graphic images of a mail carrier (or whatever) looking very sad and hopeless holding his diploma. (I say this in jest, sort of.)
