education, higher

I was reading one of my favorite bloggers today. He's a wonderful writer, clever and thoughtful, who does the best poetry parodies. But he wrote something about feeling less than people who have BAs. This makes no sense, but isn't all that rare. I know other people who are accomplished, polished, but who still feel the lack of a diploma. I know I felt it when I went back to get a degree, a step that resulted in graduate school and teaching at my old job, but I realized yesterday that as much as I loved learning new stuff and much about being in school, the deference given to a degree, particularly an advanced one is nuts.

I write this as someone who has a PhD.

Alongside the real pleasure I take in discovering and understanding the new, I had a feeling that entering academia was entering this elite level of intellectual thought, of sophisticated conversation, of nuanced understanding. This wasn't the case where I used to teach, which was rife with careerism, narrow-mindedness, and, well, just garden variety humanity. The sort of world I thought I was going to join does exist to some extent in elite institutions and some small liberal arts colleges, but it's far from commonplace. Academia can give people the time (and money) to do the sort of thinking I envisioned, but its not a necessary condition for it to happen. The necessary conditions are curiosity, discipline, and some intellectual ability. That's it And people get BAs, BSs, MSs, MAs, and PhDs everyday without any of the three.

Ok, well they have to have discipline.

Still none of these things tell you much about the person who's earned it and don't constitute evidence of intelligence, skill, or ability. But we're conditioned to think that they do and that's a huge mistake. Worse, it makes us underestimate the real talents of people without them including, sometimes, ourselves.