House of Eratosthenes

Some folks don’t appear to have learned to write. At all. They put commas and apostrophes in the wrong places, they confuse basic homonyms like “your” and “you’re,” or “there” “they’re” and “their.” Some of them skip over vital components of their sentences entirely, like verbs, and expect the reader to just stick the stuff back in and make sense of what they’ve written.

But I’m a live and let live kinda guy, and life would be boring if we all had the same opinions. And it’s kind of hard to insist everyone has to write everything perfectly before we can figure out what they’re trying to say.

Some folks seem to have a high expectation of the educational profile of others, in order for people to be worth anything. It’s not that they can point to any one thing they learned in their higher education and say, “I am so much more functional and worthwhile because I learned that.” The vibe they give off, gives greater representation to the idea that college somehow came easy for them, both for acquiring the service and for fulfilling the expectations of their professors, and they live in a tiny world in which everyone’s completed a four-year. They seem to think, you can clean school bathrooms, you can cook the fries at a fast food joint, you can dig some postholes or ditches…anything above those should require a “real” diploma and a degree.

But I’m a live and let live kinda guy, and life would be boring if we all had the same opinions. And it’s kind of hard to insist that high school diplomas really mean much of anything anymore, or that we all ought to think they do.

However — these are not two end-points of a common spectrum…they have overlap. Some folks are in both of these camps.

What do I have to say about that? Words fail me. I just don’t understand it.

Update 5/4/09: Maybe this is what they’ve got in mind (hat tip: Hewitt), when they insist that everyone who walks restaurant customers over to their waiting table, everyone who brews a fancy coffee drink behind a counter, everyone who paints the white line by the side of a road, has to have that “real” college diploma, with a declared major and everything:

You just have to go through that trial-by-fire first, people!

So if I say, I ain’t got no education, the educated person is done listening to me? If I give you my word and honor it, but an educated man can break his word while explaining why his actions are ethically sound, who has the better education?
- Dennis | 05/04/2009 @ 14:18
Regarding the former, I think that a lot of us were taught that way. “People aren’t going to listen to you if you can’t speak correctly.” I don’t necessarily see it as a live and let live issue, rather more of the sad state of education in this country. Children aren’t taught to value proper English the way they used to be. Those of us older folks who were taught that way, now that we’re hearing people speak incorrectly, it’s easy for us to fulfill that side of the prophecy. We see “your stupid” and we think “heh – your stupid what? Mind? Teachers? Choices?”

(Yes, the last three questions were all fragments…)
- Daniel | 05/04/2009 @ 15:44
I don’t necessarily see it as a live and let live issue, rather more of the sad state of education in this country.

YES, and that leads off into an fascinating topic on which I could probably write volumes without half-trying. Communication: The one human endeavor that defeats the libertarian vision, just by being. In other words, if we all engage our creative engines and each find the “best” way of doing it that works for us, without striving first to find commonality, the result is the Tower of Babel. We might as well not have bothered.

But therein lies the danger with confusing communication with thinking. They’re really exact opposites. With communication, only the ordinary has value, because where people fail to agree nothing’s going to get done. With thinking, it is the extraordinary that has value — because whoever’s replicating what someone else has done, is doing just that, replicating. No progress is being made until someone does something unprecedented.
- mkfreeberg | 05/04/2009 @ 20:40
With thinking, it is the extraordinary that has value — because whoever’s replicating what someone else has done, is doing just that, replicating. No progress is being made until someone does something unprecedented.

Brilliant, especially the last sentence. In favor of communication, though, the collitch boyz featured in the video are the perfect argument for teaching your children to communicate their thoughts and ideas well. Ferdamsure those budding young pong scholars will be communicating by grunting and pointing within another generation or two. Unprecedented ideas and concepts mean nothing without communicators to explain them; very few big things happen in a vacuum.

Excellent communicators are rare, and priceless. You’re the perfect example.
- rob | 05/05/2009 @ 01:52

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