Hi everyone, I'm new to this!
I go to a college where the general consensus seems to be that we (the students) are universally searching for a higher truth and expanding our minds with the likes of Foucault and Nietzsche. There is a certain air of superiority over the "brute masses" (I use this term with a fair deal of sarcasm, as I hope you can tell) that goes unspoken among us all. As I sat in class the other day, being beaten over the head with discussion and pompous intellectualism, I wondered: why, since I have been here, do I feel like even less of a person than when I left home telling myself that college would be better? Why have so many of my fellow cerebral knowledge-seekers gotten to the point where they left school to seek attention at mental health facilities or at home? Why is our counseling center backed up with appointments for at least two or three weeks into the future?
The answer, or so I hypothesize, goes far beyond this miserable place. My professors speak of a higher truth that the great thinkers (and by a very gratuitous extension, we the students) search for, one that takes them beyond the realm of the common man. I've written essays on this same idea, although this ideal that we are urged toward is hugely alienating. True scholars supposedly let everything else (read, social interaction) fall by the wayside. We are encouraged to follow the same path, which leaves us disconnected from one another and living in our own little worlds where the ideas don't quite connect and we end up feeling isolated from all that we know and the people we love. (I finally understand "The Allegory of the Cave" from The Republic.) It's a roller coaster that I desperately wish I never got onto, because you can never really leave it behind.
Many, if not all, of the people here at school did better than average on their SATs, were high up in their class rank, took AP classes... this may sound like smugness, but I really do not care for it. I feel a bit like we are puppets of the administration, or, if you wish me to sound a bit more paranoid and banal, our culture, to learn learn learn with no regard for the social connections that actually keep communities marginally intact. We are not superior to anyone because of our test scores or IQs, for in fact, we are not superior to anyone at all. People I have met "on the outside," away from this little bubble that is basically in an intellectual circle-jerk all the time, are a thousand times happier than the people here, who hold a veiled (or sometimes a very open) disdain for people without their "intellectual prowess."
I get that taking a harsh stand against rigorous higher education in the form I am trying to describe may be a bit controversial, but I ask you: do you feel the same way, or am I slipping off into crazy-land? I honestly can't tell these days.
I go to a college where the general consensus seems to be that we (the students) are universally searching for a higher truth and expanding our minds with the likes of Foucault and Nietzsche. There is a certain air of superiority over the "brute masses" (I use this term with a fair deal of sarcasm, as I hope you can tell) that goes unspoken among us all. As I sat in class the other day, being beaten over the head with discussion and pompous intellectualism, I wondered: why, since I have been here, do I feel like even less of a person than when I left home telling myself that college would be better? Why have so many of my fellow cerebral knowledge-seekers gotten to the point where they left school to seek attention at mental health facilities or at home? Why is our counseling center backed up with appointments for at least two or three weeks into the future?
The answer, or so I hypothesize, goes far beyond this miserable place. My professors speak of a higher truth that the great thinkers (and by a very gratuitous extension, we the students) search for, one that takes them beyond the realm of the common man. I've written essays on this same idea, although this ideal that we are urged toward is hugely alienating. True scholars supposedly let everything else (read, social interaction) fall by the wayside. We are encouraged to follow the same path, which leaves us disconnected from one another and living in our own little worlds where the ideas don't quite connect and we end up feeling isolated from all that we know and the people we love. (I finally understand "The Allegory of the Cave" from The Republic.) It's a roller coaster that I desperately wish I never got onto, because you can never really leave it behind.
Many, if not all, of the people here at school did better than average on their SATs, were high up in their class rank, took AP classes... this may sound like smugness, but I really do not care for it. I feel a bit like we are puppets of the administration, or, if you wish me to sound a bit more paranoid and banal, our culture, to learn learn learn with no regard for the social connections that actually keep communities marginally intact. We are not superior to anyone because of our test scores or IQs, for in fact, we are not superior to anyone at all. People I have met "on the outside," away from this little bubble that is basically in an intellectual circle-jerk all the time, are a thousand times happier than the people here, who hold a veiled (or sometimes a very open) disdain for people without their "intellectual prowess."
I get that taking a harsh stand against rigorous higher education in the form I am trying to describe may be a bit controversial, but I ask you: do you feel the same way, or am I slipping off into crazy-land? I honestly can't tell these days.
