Last Updated on: 25th September 2013, 11:35 am
Well, aren’t I in a happy mood? There’s just something that’s been pissing me off, and it pissed me off enough to write it down. Like I said before, I go to school, and I don’t know what it is about other people who go to school that makes them think they’re better than everyone else. For me, I go to school for a reason. To get a degree so I can have a piece of paper so I can say I went to school and now I have some semblance of qualifications. I’ve come to find out that they don’t seem to give a rat’s ass what that degree is in, just as long as you have a degree. I know that this degree is a means to an end, to get out and join the real world.
But there are people who I see around me who think that because they are going to school, they are somehow enlightened folk, and they are better than those who don’t go to school. Let me give a couple of examples. Right now I’m taking a course which I can’t stand, but I’m almost done my degree, so I’m sucking it up. It’s about gender and organizational dynamics. Snore snore snore. Basically the whole course just keeps telling us that women are fucked because they’re women and they’re just doomed to get a big fat goose egg on the glass ceiling and never go anywhere. Talk about starting off your self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, I heard something in that class that pissed me off. The prof said, “Maybe not as much discriminatory behaviour happens here because this is a university. Perhaps it is more prevalent in the less educated population.” Wake up, sunshine, education doesn’t make a lick of difference in this case. If people want to be dicks, they can be a more educated dick or a less educated dick. They’re still inherently a dick. Open-mindedness and education are two different things. It’s about beliefs, not whether or not you’re used to having to use no. 2 pencils to fill out multiple choice tests.
Believe me, I know. I’ve met plenty of these educated dicks, and they often think they are among the enlightened folk. I worked for departments at the university, and that’s where I got treated like the most shit.
Here’s another example. A friend of mine who’s in my same program said this about her boyfriend the other day, and I wanted to take her and shake her until I didn’t have any rage left in me. “Maybe it’s because I go to university and he doesn’t that I can’t have a conversation with him. I’m just more articulate than him.” Ok, hold the damn poney. I’ve met some pretty inarticulate university students and some people who didn’t go to school who could talk circles around me. Don’t use your level of education as an excuse for why your relationship is failing. If you’re so damn incompatible, why do you want to be with him anyway?
And this was the one that provoked me to write this morning. I’m choking down this bullshit for the class I can’t stand which we’ve all started calling “Men are Pigs” class, and I read this statement:
“The person who fixes your refrigerator probably makes more than the local librarian.”
Well wouldn’t you expect that? I’d rather that my meat not give me salmonella than, woe is me, I can’t find the philosophy of socrates in the library. I don’t understand the theory that because this person has to do with reading, they obviously need more money than anyone else, even though fixing the fridge is kind of more practically important. I think the fridge dude should get more money. Fridge dude might save my life.
Don’t get me wrong, librarians are important and if we can’t read, we’re all fucked because we’ll just believe what we’re told, oh wait that’s happening already. But christ it’s a stupid comparison to make to prove that women aren’t getting enough money in that job, and it’s pretentious to belittle the person who’s doing a supposedly lower status job just because they didn’t go to school.
Ah. I feel better now. Now how to end this post. I just hope it makes someone think, even if they disagree with me and think I’m a raving lunatic. Hell maybe I am. But I’m a raving lunatic who doesn’t think I’m any better than another raving lunatic who didn’t happen to go to school.