The soul-destroying effect of an elite education | Hacker News Reader

The soul-destroying effect of an elite education

canada.com

14 pointscadalac19 comments

Why is this rubbish being linked by hacker news? This is a barely-comprehensible, illogical rant. There's nothing wrong with being self-taught, but I'm getting sick of this anti-intellectualism. There's nothing wrong with learning how to teach yourself more efficiently, either, which is precisely what modern liberal education proscribes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education)

Practice and principle are often to very different things.

And..? Please state what you're trying to insinuate, so the rest of us can learn from your knowledge.

I'm saying that the strict definition of liberal education is not of much use when discussing the actual state of higher education because we can't assume an absolute corollary between the two.

Tip: http://thesaurus.reference.com//browse/proscribe

...What is this? It's illogical, offers no evidence to support its thesis, and is more pretentious than anything I've read in a long time.

"There are students who can't be stopped, and there are students who can't be started. The latter have always been more numerous."

Best thing I've read so far this week.

I agree wholeheartedly with this and it is a problem I face 3 times a week in the class I teach. At a fancy elite university most students tend to do very well and study a lot. Here, not so much. I'm grading exams, and 1 student out of forty got the "harder" problem correct.

I study a lot for grad classes and its been one of most satisfying experiences I've had. Studying what you really love lights such a fire inside, i hardly believe it.

Could also be titled, "Why I stopped reading newspapers".

Am I to understand that this article's point is that Barack Obama is dumber than Sarah Palin because she's self taught and he went to an Ivy League school?

This is still HN right?

The article says nothing about Palin or Obama, why bring that up? In any case, Sarah Palin graduated from the University of Idaho (after transferring around a few different schools).

All of which proves... well, nothing.

From the article's conclusion:

The preceding rant is to be taken merely as a preface to something shorter and more aphoristic I wanted to say about commentary on the U.S. election. It has to do with the comparison that is made, usually by insinuation but often overtly -- throughout the mass media, and especially in the elitist mass media -- between the educational backgrounds of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

Looks like politics to me. Flagged.

He mentions the political candidates in the last graph, as simply what he'd like to write about next time?

If you say so.

"to be taken .. as a preface.."

When he gets to trashing one of the candidates, make your objections then. How about that?

Or you could complain that if he had written the other article, and if it had appeared on HN, how inappropriate it would be (and I would agree)

Geesh. Looking for any fights lately?

Actually, the writer is saying that the entire article is to be taken as a preface to that last statement, which is clearly about politics.

And prefaces are not content. One can agree with the preface and not the body of the argument.

I'm not going to argue. I give up. Logically the preface is part of the rest of the text. Problem is, there is no rest of the text. But I guess that doesn't matter. If the preface is supposed to lead to a political discussion, even if the preface is non-political, that makes the entire preface political.

I just wish I had such keen eyes. Without the author's last graph, who could have known the rest of his text was so political in nature?

Oops. I must have missed the last paragraph.

This finish ruined an otherwise B-minus curmudgeon-y article:

It has to do with the comparison that is made, usually by insinuation but often overtly -- throughout the mass media, and especially in the elitist mass media -- between the educational backgrounds of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

Few people really care that Obama went to better schools than Sarah Palin. I certainly don't. We care about the fact that Obama is significantly smarter than Palin, and accomplished a lot more with the opportunities he had, rather than washing out of four undergraduate colleges.

In what is Sarah Palin self-taught, anyway? Shooting wolves from helicopters? She's obviously uncomfortable with ideas that challenge her narrow worldview, as her anti-library crusade illustrates.

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