College Made Me Stupider

College made me stupider. Or at least the classes I took at college made me stupider. In the time I took passively absorbing and regurgitating information, I could have doing what I wanted to do. I could have learned through doing things with other people, or studied what I wanted to study. It’s called self-directed or collaborative learning, and it’s about the only way anyone truly learns anything. College workloads discourage self-directed and collaborative learning. Hence, I am now slightly dumber than I would have been had I not gone to school and had spent the tuition money on something else.

I think that, deep down, we all understand this. Think a little bit, and you’ll realize that you learned about the things you’re truly interested in outside of class. Same goes with most of the people you know. The only exceptions are the budding young academics I'm friends with- all three of them. You really only learn how to be an academic here, since all you're doing is academic work. You naturally internalize the lifestyle, the manner of thinking and acting. College is an institution that, like all institutions, is built to sustain itself: it trains people to be academics so they can then go on to train other young people to be academics. No wonder the market is flooded with wretched graduate students who can’t find an academic job.

It’s not as though I learned nothing here- but it would be remarkable if I did anything for four years and learned nothing. The difference is that I paid $2oo,ooo for these particular four years. While I did learn a few scattered things about philosophy (my major), I don’t have any profound or cohesive understanding of the subject. I can barely apply any of the philosophy I learned here to my own understanding of the world, which is the real value of knowledge. After four years at this college, I have a profound understanding only of what’s wrong with it. I wonder if that was worth $200,000.

Of course it wasn’t, which suggests to me that school is about something else- namely, showing to employers that you’re willing to take orders for four more years. And not only that, you’re willing to pay to take orders. It’s funny when you think about it. Usually, if you’re taking orders from someone, they’re at least paying you; here, it’s the opposite. But college is about landing a job. Students understand this.

"The most commonly mentioned reasons to go to college included getting career training, getting a better job, and making more money" the journalist David Kirp writes in his overview of the corporate college, Shakespeare, Einstein, and The Bottom Line. Or, more broadly, as the sociologist Mitchell Stevens wrote in his book Creating a Class, higher education is another step in the factory process of "social reproduction" which "systematically favors the wealthy, well-educated, and well-connected." This is so obvious as to be almost intuitive. Only in self-congratulatory college propaganda is school centrally about learning or “intellectual autonomy” or whatever.

As Hunter Thompson might say, “there’s something seriously bent” about heading off into the middle of Ohio to submerge oneself in a neo-feudal model of subservience to a covenant of learned priests. It’s even odder to want to pay $200,000 for it. But the kind of person who’s able to make it into an elite institution like Oberlin is usually the kind of person who would pay that $200,000, because that kind of person has been taking orders his or her whole life. We did every idiotic thing our public school teachers told us to do and went through the same grueling process of selling ourselves ("the admissions process").

Noam Chomsky describes it as a trial by idiocy: "People are filtered out for obedience. If you can guarantee lots of stupidity in the educational system, you know that the only people who will make it through are people like me who are willing to do it no matter how stupid it is because we want to go to the next step." Oberlin may have crowned itself as an eternally electic, left of center college, but most of its students are bred though stupidity to obey. We would otherwise not have made it this far. It cannot be otherwise.

This basic fact explains Oberlin. There’s a reason we’re defined by awkwardness: anyone who could deny their own feelings for their whole life is bound to be something of an emotional cripple. If there is such a thing as emotional intelligence, than many Oberlin students (including and especially myself) are emotional idiots as surely as the kids in the stupid class back in our high schools were academic idiots. William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, described this phenomenon as “Ivy retardation”:

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic…. Social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense.

This intellectual disparity helps explain why the much of the arts here are so careful and academic (and thus completely useless), why the dating scene is pathetic, and why life at Oberlin is often flat and uninteresting. The reason is simple: it's long been understood that obedience to authority is anathema to spontaneity and communal interaction (as well as, it should be mentioned, true learning). But “we came here to study”, right?

Much of college is useless beyond career advancement, but there are exceptions. The sciences are real academic subjects that can be taught successfully in schools; unlike the "social sciences" and the arts, they truly are a specialized form of knowledge that can only be learned in a rigorous setting under established authorities. And, as opposed to most of America, people actually do things at a college. Colleges, because of their pre-capitalist roots, have some kind of autonomy relative to the outside world that does allow for some kind of community. Oberlin’s civil society may be withering and of little consequence, but at least it exists.

But otherwise, while Oberlin may be "a good school", it remains a school. It's problems are mostly inherent. I certainly won't miss it. Or at least I hope I won't. Imagine if the rest of the world is miserable enough that I actually would...