Today no great advances
can be made, nor can the problems facing us be understood, by
anyone who stays within the borders of one of the present academic
disciplines. In each, the workers are smothered in
overspecialization and pedantry. Yet in each the majority of
members are very busy congratulating each other on the wonderful
work they are a ll doing. That is self-deception, for the
regular academic disciplines are now bankrupt, incapable of
providing their explanations or solutions to
problems.
The chief group of discontented are, of
course, the students, who grow increasingly restless, discontented,
and alienated because of their recognition of the large-scale
irrelevance of so much of what they have to learn. Within these
fields, some teachers realize, more or less unconsciously, that
much is wrong. Yet they feel that they must go on, and d o so,
rationalizing that they have to make a living somehow, and this is
the only way they are equipped to earn what is needed, and,
secondly they assure themselves and their students that the latter
must have a college education.
This latter belief is correct only if
the student is determined to make his living by finding a place in
the great and ever-growing bureaucracies which envelop our world
and now overshadow it. But all of these bureaucracies do their
work inefficiently and badly. They look good only if we accept
their own fraudulent bookkeeping.
If a student wants to spend his life e
n-capsulated in the interstices of one of these monstrous
structures, I suppose he does need a college education, not because
college prepares him to do their work but simply because these
structures increasingly demand a college degree as a ticket of
admission to their employ. They demand that only because it
indicates that the, holder of that ticket h as submitted to years
of brainwashing in irrelevancies and will put up with the myths of
the bureaucracy he joins.
Self-Education
If a young man today simply wants to
make a very good living associated with freedom and variety, he can
do it much better without a college education. Of course he
must be educated, but real education today can he obtained much m
ore easily (although it is never easy) in constant attendance at a
good public library than at the so-called "best” universities
(which are frequently the worst ones). Today, as almost never
before, the way lies open to any enterprising young man to find
something to do which is now being done badly or not done at all by
our bureaucratized society.
To do this the first task of the young
man must be to dismiss as the myth it is what passes for truth in
existing universities. There is a truth and it can be found;
it has been found, to some degree, by men in the past, and by men
in other societies. The task of finding it is lifelong, and
probably continues after bodily death, and the greatest joy of
living is the search for it. That is why we are here, but to
find it in the accepted wisdom of the existing academic structure
is to put oneself in an intellectual prison, which does not
help.
Of course, if someone can go to college
and not become a prisoner of its myths and can continue free from
the bureaucratic structure toward which the average college seeks
to direct students, he can also live a good life and, like a
non-college man, get rewards greater, even in
material things, than the average college-bureaucracy-tied person.
And in addition, like Ralph Nader, he will be able to keep his
freedom and self-respect, which is worth something.
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