The Eternal Student
Posted: July 9th, 2008 | Author: khosrow | Tags: education, Life, Rants, Writings | No Comments »
A while ago, we had a discussion over dinner about the merits of higher education. I was trying my best to argue against non-functional and non-essential education: getting a Masters degree just for the sake of getting one, and so on. From the length of the conversation, it appears I wasn’t very successful at convincing everyone else about my position. A couple of nights ago I came across this passage
When a society is rich, its people don’t need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they’ve got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries…[1]