John Callan wrote:

> Somewhere along the line you have or you will run into someone other than
> yourself...or your
> family... that you will willingly invest knowledge and care in.  (You old
> softy...just a regulary 90's kinda guy!)

I've invested time and interest in a lot of people in the work environment. I
have also received a great deal of investment from others to which I like to feel
indebted. I think it important though, to keep in mind that all honest
investments are paid off once they are made. I don't think it healthy to expect a
return on the educational investment as it enslaves both parties.

My problem w/ formal education, as in academia, is that I see it as bribing
someone to let you hang out with them in the hopes that you might learn
something; a middle-class desperation to talk yourself into perceiving value in
nothing. Because you had to pay for it, and everyone was doing it, it must be
good, in fact, the cost was high enough that it had to be the best and every
other avenue must stink by comparison. I had possibly too early an exposure,
being raised near an Ivy League campus, to intellectual snobbery. Mine is a
somewhat more enlighted attitude than the stonemason I first apprenticed to who
said that colleges were not worth anything more than distribution sites for sex
and drugs. Which is not to say that I am against paying the bribe or wild
parties.

In work mentoring you either produce to a sufficient level to maintain the
economic relationship or you are out. At the end of the day you collect a pay
check, or you do not. You either learn to survive, or you are not there.

I'm skeptical of an educational system that gives students a lot of BS and leaves
them with careers starting with paying off debt. There are other ways to go
through life, yet they are not marketed for the fact that, like with herbal
remedies, the holders of capital have nothing to profit from. (An aside, if the
Marxists in American academe really believed what they are talking about then
they would quit their jobs, cut the BS, and go get a real job.)

I'm not focusing solely on the Preservation programs here, as my first interest
with education is the subject of literature. I was advised, and agreed, a long
time ago that the way to become a good writer was to not take creative writing
courses. Then some time later a friend who went through the cycle of academe, and
ruined his best nature as an artist as a result, told me that I was ten years
behind myself for not staying in the academic track. Well, I don't think so.
--
][<en Follett
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