the distance between what we learn in school and what we do on the job is SO far that it’s laughable (and other jabs at the academy)

welcome to today’s rant about the brokenness of our education system. this is an ongoing rant, if you haven’t been reading along. #sorrynotsorry.

some jumbled thoughts:

• a few weekends ago i had a conversation with two friends (let’s call them a & m). we were all lamenting the distance between what we learned in school and what we found we needed to know on the job. a was saying how the most useful things to her work was finance. m was saying that there was almost no relationship between what she learned in school and what she did right out of college (because it takes a while to get to a point in your career where you’re doing what you learn in school and lots of people don’t ever even get to that point because they choose to practice different types of law).
  
  now, on the one hand, i do believe that it’s really important to have time to step outside of the flow of practical learning. creating mental space to explore the history, ideas, and theories in a field of interest is important.
  
  that said, it just feels way to fucking expensive and time-consuming for what it is currently. people are putting themselves in debt to not learn skills they’re going to need on the job. is that not ludicrous? seems like there’s a strong connection here to what i wrote about the other in seneca’s letter 48: isn’t it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time’s so desperately short?
  
  
• for a while i’ve been noticing the tension in phd students between teaching and doing their research. this carries on to professors (because they’re trained in the process of earning their phds). this tension in the leaders of academia is the exact problem manifested. professors are valued by on their research publications and even though they’re given teaching responsibilities, those come secondary. engaging with the present world and putting energy towards making it better (in this case to further student learning) is said to be a requirement, but in actuality, there are no/weak systems for professors them accountable to this “requirement.”
  
  
• i’ve had a few conversations about this, but the most recent one was with a friend (let’s call her n) about funding in academia. the older we get, the more we’re both seeing into the structures that make academia possible: fucking giant government grants. for many academic institutions, when you win a grant from the government, the institution charges a massive overhead (tax) on the grant. this overhead funds all the people who work at institution, sometimes including the person who won the grant.
  
  now, on one hand, i do believe it is actually important for the government to fundamentally support education. if tax dollars can go anywhere freely, it should be education.
  
  but on the other hand, it totally seems like the people doing the educating should be getting way more of the money. from where i stand, this whole thing looks increasingly like a scheme to funnel job support money back and forth for the certain classes of people (government officials and university staff/faculty). and why is it that we can fund academia so well when literally everyone there knows how little direct good it does for the world, but we can’t see to figure out how to fund public schools? why can we afford to fund the schools that a fraction of the population goes to but we can’t fund the ones that everyone goes to? you can probably guess my answer…

hmph.

ps - in hindsight, i have no idea why i bulleted these. i hate bullets that are sentences. T_T

writing: 21:21
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 2:34

“you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad...”

there is a recurring theme in seneca’s writing that i am coming to appreciate a lot. in letter LV (55), he puts it like this:

“the place one’s in doesn’t make for peace of mind, it’s the spirit that makes things agreeable”

below, i’ve typed up seneca’s thoughts on the same topic but in a much more thought out way. they’re excerpts from letter CIV (104) and the argumentative arc seems perfect.

i can think of at least five people in my life who i think are suffering from lack of this knowledge. while i do believe a certain physical place can allow one to do things they couldn’t do before, most of the issues people have in places are internal. a move for a particular industry or type of culture that is strong in one place makes sense. but many relocations aren’t made with such strong determinants in mind.

since finishing graduate school, i’ve seen a number of people leave town, seeking happiness and fulfillment in their new home. turns out, a majority (but not all) of them land their new town and have the exact same struggles. seneca is on to something when he said “It’s medicine, not a particular part of the world, that a person needs if he’s ill.”

excerpts in an argumentative arc about why travel doesn’t solve people’s problems from letter CIV (and here’s letter CIV in full):

“… the man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet, will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing. the story is told that someone complained to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good and received the reply: ‘What else can you expect, seeing that you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad?’… If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person…

…What good has travel itself been able to do anyone?… It has never acted as a check on pleasure or a restraint influence on desires; it has never controlled the temper of an angry man or quelled the reckless impulses of a  lover; never has it rid the personality of a fault… All it has ever done is distract us for a little while, through the novelty of our surroundings, like children fascinated by something they haven’t come across before. The instability, moreover, of a mind which is seriously unwell, is aggravated by it, the motion itself increasing the fitfulness and restlessness. This explains why people, after setting out for a place with the greatest of enthusiasm, are often more enthusiastic about getting away from it; like migrant birds they fly on, away even quicker than they came…

… But travel won’t make a better or saner man of yourself. For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have merged from their researches, and carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered…

… So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honorable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting…It’s medicine, not a particular part of the world, that a person needs if he’s ill.”

writing: 8:41
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 5:58

isn't it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time's so desperately short?

more stoic philosophy:

“…isn’t it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time’s so desperately short!” - Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter XLVIII

i think this idea is universally true and has always been. in fact, i can actually imagine that it’s part of what certain people at certain points in history “get ahead.” maybe it has to do with being an early adopter, maybe not. but i can imagine a trend among people who have a knack for identifying what is folly to learn based on their current context and avoiding those things.

this is showing up for me in two contexts. the first is preparing to live life in a trump presidency. the second is watching education systems fail all over the place.

on the trump point, i’m finding myself drawn to different things than before. i’m thinking more about what skills and knowledge do i want to have to best serve my community (myself included) in a fascist america. this has shifted my reading list and also where i think i should be spending my time.

on the education systems side, i’ve talked about this several times before, but it really comes down to google and cell phones. it’s crazy to me that school systems are still “teaching” people, young and old, with a deficit model. we have a lot of human knowledge available at our fingertips, but we’re still transferring knowledge in industrial ways. the model of school has just got to evolve to take that into account. the goal of education (to prepare future generations for participation in the world) can still be the same, but the tactics and methods need to evolve. it is folly to not do so and i’d argue that we’re actually wasting resources while also diminishing the ability of future generations to participate well in the world we’re living in (which is, itself, changing constantly).

ps - the edition i’ve been linking to isn’t the edition i’ve been reading. the one i’m ready has language that makes much more sense to me, but isn’t online. the translation differences seem minor but they have a marked difference on meaning. sucks.

writing: 12:54
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 5:58

one of the people i respect the most about the internet is going dark as soon as possible

one of the people i have the most respect for in the tech world (let’s call her alex) is planning on going dark as soon as possible. this terrifies me.

alex has watched the internet evolve pretty much from day one and she has gone from staunch advocate for it to wanting as little to do with is as soon as is feasible. this is difficult because she works as a technology head at her day job, but as soon as she can retire, she said she’s going off the grid.

her reasons are pretty solid:

1. nothing is neutral.
2. with the amount of data that private corporations now have on individuals, it’s almost trivial for someone to hack a system and learn everything about who you are.
3. america’s response to the snowden situation is insane. at a national scale, we publicly saw that the government is regularly committing unconstitutional acts… and almost nothing has changed. the snooping that the government does has basically been socially greenlighted (under president obama, this seemed like not a big deal… under president trump, this is fucking terrifying).
4. google, a private company, is constantly and continuously collecting data on us in order to garner massive profits and sell our information to marketers and advertisers. people talk about the fear of artificial intelligence like it’s going to appear in a humanoid form (a la ex machina). if google knows basically everything about you (they have almost all of your emails even if you don’t use gmail yourself and many of your documents), targets you with ads, and then is able to learn whether or not you respond to those ads to do the targeting better, google itself is a learning machine that sooner or later will be ai (or something).

yikes.

scary resources:

• ACLU Says the Feds Have Asked Apple and Google to Unlock Devices Many Times
  
  
• Google Deceptively Tracks Students’ Internet Browsing, EFF Says in FTC Complaint
  
  relevant line: “While Google does not use student data for targeted advertising within a subset of Google sites, EFF found that Google’s “Sync” feature for the Chrome browser is enabled by default on Chromebooks sold to schools. This allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for non-advertising purposes, records of every Internet site students visit, every search term they use, the results they click on, videos they look for and watch on YouTube, and their saved passwords. Google doesn’t first obtain permission from students or their parents and since some schools require students to use Chromebooks, many parents are unable to prevent Google’s data collection.”
  
  
• Not OK, Google: Chromium voice extension pulled after spying concerns

writing: 15:03
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 9:01

seneca’s rejection of useless work

i’m pretty surprised about this, but seneca is really my jam right now. letter LXXXVIII (88) is all about the distinction between useless pursuits of knowledge/skill and meaningful ones. if you can stomach the style of language, he really just shreds so many different lines of work into bits. it’s actually kind of comical when you really get into his flow. but mostly it feels refreshing.

his overarching point, and i think i’m learning that is a pillar of stoicism, is that unless your work is helping you or other people learn how to live better, you’re not doing important work. and better, in the stoic sense, means with more alignment between mind and body. there is a staunch rejection of consumerism and wealth accumulation. some quotes:

Pronouncing syllables, investigating words, memorizing plays, or making rules for the scansion of poetry, what is there in all this that rids one of fear, roots out desire, or bridles the passions?

The mathematician teaches me how to lay out the dimensions of my estates; but I should rather be taught how to lay out what is enough for a man to own.

“I am being driven from the farm which my father and grandfather owned!” Well? Who owned the land before your grandfather? Can you explain what people (I will not say what person) held it originally? You did not enter upon it as a master, but merely as a tenant. And whose tenant are you? If your claim is successful, you are tenant of the heir. The lawyers say that public property cannot be acquired privately by possession; what you hold and call your own is public property – indeed, it belongs to mankind at large.

some of those last lines sound identical to things i’ve learned from my new interactions with and readings of work by indigenous people. their words and seneca’s all make me throw into question (even more than i already had) ideas in the west about society, land, education, ownership, and more. if any of these aren’t helping us move towards being better people individually, better people as a collective, and better stewards of the land on which walk, then like wtf is the point?

anyway, this whole letter is worth the read, but here’s some of the chunks i like the most.

quotes:

“The scholar busies himself with investigations into language, and if it be his desire to go farther afield, he works on history, or, if he would extend his range to the farthest limits, on poetry. But which of these paves the way to virtue? Pronouncing syllables, investigating words, memorizing plays, or making rules for the scansion of poetry, what is there in all this that rids one of fear, roots out desire, or bridles the passions? The question is: do such men teach virtue, or not? If they do not teach it, then neither do they transmit it. If they do teach it, they are philosophers. Would you like to know how it happens that they have not taken the chair for the purpose of teaching virtue? See how unlike their subjects are; and yet their subjects would resemble each other if they taught the same thing…

Now I will transfer my attention to the musician. You, sir, are teaching me how the treble and the bass are in accord with one another, and how, though the strings produce different notes, the result is a harmony; rather bring my soul into harmony with itself, and let not my purposes be out of tune. You are showing me what the doleful keys are; show me rather how, in the midst of adversity, I may keep from uttering a doleful note. The mathematician teaches me how to lay out the dimensions of my estates; but I should rather be taught how to lay out what is enough for a man to own. He teaches me to count, and adapts my fingers to avarice; but I should prefer him to teach me that there is no point in such calculations, and that one is none the happier for tiring out the book-keepers with his possessions – or rather, how useless property is to any man who would find it the greatest misfortune if he should be required to reckon out, by his own wits, the amount of his holdings. What good is there for me in knowing how to parcel out a piece of land, if I know not how to share it with my brother? What good is there in working out to a nicety the dimensions of an acre, and in detecting the error if a piece has so much as escaped my measuring-rod, if I am embittered when an ill-tempered neighbour merely scrapes off a bit of my land? The mathematician teaches me how I may lose none of my boundaries; I, however, seek to learn how to lose them all with a light heart. "But,” comes the reply, “I am being driven from the farm which my father and grandfather owned!” Well? Who owned the land before your grandfather? Can you explain what people (I will not say what person) held it originally? You did not enter upon it as a master, but merely as a tenant. And whose tenant are you? If your claim is successful, you are tenant of the heir. The lawyers say that public property cannot be acquired privately by possession; what you hold and call your own is public property – indeed, it belongs to mankind at large. O what marvellous skill! You know how to measure the circle; you find the square of any shape which is set before you; you compute the distances between the stars; there is nothing which does not come within the scope of your calculations. But if you are a real master of your profession, measure me the mind of man! Tell me how great it is, or how puny! You know what a straight line is; but how does it benefit you if you do not know what is straight in this life of ours?“

writing: 11:38
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