Biggest shock growing up

I’m in med school now, and the biggest shock for me growing up has been that almost no one gives a shit about intellectual questions or literature or anything like that. I’m literally weird enough that in high school I would get a high out of formalist literary analysis, and I genuinely love thinking about and discussing epistemology, cognitive science, religion, language and linguistics, political theory and that kinda stuff.

I was actually stupid enough to think that just bc so many ppl in college engage in this stuff for 4 years (or bc I was in an academic environment for high school and college) that they actually give a shit. But over the past few years I’ve realized it’s basically an act that ppl have to put on to get grades, get a job, and move on w their lives. This must have been obvious to most normal ppl from the get go, but I didn’t really fully get that till about now. And I’m left laughing at myself and asking “why put ppl thru this, then?”

Despite being taught grammar their entire lives, in a language they speak every day, very few people I know know where to put commas. And as for constructions like the conditional and conditional perfect, they’re completely lost. It’s not just doctors.. it’s everyone ever. And it’s not just the language - all people get out of trigonometry is SOHCAHTOA, unit circle be damned, and they can’t calculate tips despite having taken calc in high school.

We should just stop bothering to teach this stuff, maybe. Maybe put ppl into professional school at age 15, and stop trying to make ppl bs about stuff they don’t care for in college. It’s more toward what England and most of the rest of the world does. But universities are such huge industries in America at this point that it would be hard to reverse.

Like.. I once talked to a senior at Ann Arbor who majored for 4 years in Spanish and couldn’t speak a sentence of Spanish. That’s the societal cost, times tens of millions every decade. Guess we’ll just keep making everyone (who isn’t in STEM) study critical theory and literature for 4 years, whether they want to or not. We’ll just keep telling people they’re brilliant.

But maybe ppl shouldn’t have to pretend to be intellectuals.

Submitted January 05, 2021 at 05:29PM by Berzebuey https://ift.tt/35gP3Tk