On Liberal Education
Please follow this link: “Why I Defaulted On My Student
Loans”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/why-i-defaulted-on-my-student-loans.html?_r=0
I
think that Mr. Siegel learned a real lesson from his liberal education. “Liberal”
education means education for a free person; and surely debt servitude is not
freedom. In effect the college gave him one last test; honor those excessive
debts or not? Fail this test and you’re a rule-following slave, pass it and you’re
reprehensible but free. Siegel had to choose between subjugation and rebellion;
he chose rebellion, and he advocates the same for others. I say that his
liberal education was a success.
My
own education did not involve debt, thank goodness, but U.C. Berkeley had to
exploit me somehow, so they underpaid me as a ‘teaching assistant’ - that is, a
teacher, for the professors were figureheads. At the time I thought that my
hours spent learning Metamathematics and Set Theory were the valuable core of
my grad-school education, and my hours spent teaching Algebra, Statistics and
Calculus were make-work. After graduation I learned that no-one wanted to pay a
cent for Metamath, but I could make a living teaching Algebra. So in practice
the make-work was education, and the education was make-work.
But
though I filled up spiral-bound notebooks with class notes about transfinite
cardinals, and though those notebooks fill milk-crates, all now gathering dust
in a shed, still my efforts were not in vain; for this dreary labor provoked me
to eradicate the transfinite entirely. Refuting transfinite set theory requires
paradox; so I wrote my thesis on paradox logic, and it was accepted.
Paradox
logic proved to be, in financial terms, almost as worthless as set theory. I
figure that sales on my textbooks on this subject have earned me hundreds of dollars so far. But paradox
logic has also proved to be enormously valuable to me, in spiritual terms. The world makes more sense to me with paradox
included; there are so many things that are as true as they’re false. Once you
see the logic-knots, you can’t unsee them; but neither do they mislead you anymore.
To me, detecting paradox is both profitable and consoling.
And
liberating. So I too, unwittingly, got the benefit of a liberal education. But
please note; not by borrowing for it but by slaving for it; and not by
remembering it but by rejecting it!
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