CatholicUK on The Risk of Education

Here's a sharp look at getting an education in spite of your academic experience. CatholicUK has the story here.

Here's a taste:

I was a "straight-A" and often "A*" student at school, yet I was always plagued by frustration and dissatisfaction. I think that I managed to exploit the school system to my advantage, partly through the admonitions of my dad, a teacher, who always said "never let your schooling interfere with your education" - but then paradoxically pushed me to do well academically, in an almost narrowly academic way.

Like any well-educated, although usually non-academic, person, CatholicUK cites the might G.K.:

To say of the bulk of human beings that they are uneducated is like
saying of a Red Indian hunter that he has not yet taken his degree.
He has taken many other things. And so, sincerely speaking,
there are no uneducated men. They may escape the trivial
examinations, but not the tremendous examinations of existence.
The dependence of infancy, the enjoyment of animals, the love
of woman and the fear of death -- these are more frightful and more
fixed than all conceivable forms of the cultivation of the mind.
It is idle to complain of schools and colleges being trivial.
In no case will a college ever teach the important things.
He has learnt them right or wrong, and he has learnt them all alone.


- G. K. Chesterton, "What's Right with the World?"

I learned to be skeptical of "professionals" at an early age. My mother taught me that. She never finished High School. That helped solidify her education. When my younger brother came around, she soon knew something was wrong. She brought him to doctors, psychologists and specialists of all sorts--all academically trained professionals and Reasonable men. They assured her it was only in her mind. Robert was fine. She knew better. Finally, she persuaded a psychologist to examine Robert in his office. My brother was having one of his usual fits of hyperactivity. He ran into the good psychologist's filing cabinet at full speed and split his forehead open. He'd need about 14 stitches to seal the wound. While placing anything they could on Robert's forehead to slow the bleeding, the psychologist told my mother that, after careful consideration, perhaps she was right about Robert having a problem. Being an educated woman that hadn't had her intelligence squelshed by academia, she replied, "No shit. I've only been telling you people for months!"

I'm a Special Education teacher by trade. Many of you already know. Simply put, I'm a professional. I'm also a fool, or at least, I strive to become one. Reasonableness of the sort practiced by my learned breatheren simply never made sense. Theory should explain what observation, intuition and common sense already determine about a situation. If it doesn't, then the theory needs reworking. I never lost that professional skeptism. That's what's allowed me to connect with special needs kids and really help them get what they need. The models and paradigms can go to hell if they don't help me help them, because they're not going anywhere else as long as I'm teaching them!

Anyone that can survive their years in academia and still emerge an educated person deserves everyone's respect. Let's throw back a cold one for them!