School of Life

I am as guilty of this as the next man. Or at least, I used to be. When I was 16 all my friends decided they were going to bugger off and go to University, leaving me with literally no-one to play with. Of course the ego kicks in defensive, and I declared that University be a waste of time. There was no jobs anyway, I reasoned, so why go and get a degree to end up jobless when you could just be jobless anyway.

A friend of mine at the time, Din, asked if I could understand the notion of simply learning because its good to learn, and one may have a love of the subject. Being young, and stupid, I told him I had no idea what he was on about.

So today, a full half my life on, I find myself at University having to defend myself against exactly the kind of thing I was saying all those years ago. Many people on the social networking site Facebook list as their education 'School of Life'.

This is intended to represent many things. Firstly, that they've seen it and done it. Whatever it is, they've experienced it and have the scars to show. Secondly, it illustrates that they don't need no education, they've learnt enough. GCSE's were a waste of time, they just left school and got on with the business of making money.

The third thing I believe it implies, is that those who have got an education can't possibly know or have experienced as much as they. Let's be clear, there are two schools of skill. There's the practical, and the academic. Sure, some boffin with his face in a book all day would be ill-prepared to fix your plumbing. But I wouldn't trust a plumber to do brain surgery either. Is one better than the other? I'd say not. I'd say each one has its merits and each practitioner should be equally proud of their work.

The other day I posted a humorous Facebook update, and to cut a long story short, I was met with a comment by one of my friends that, as a student, I don't live in the 'real world'. Now I'm not sure which world I live in then, because I assure you if there's a nuclear war I will be affected. If there's a drought or food shortage, I will find myself hungry or thirsty. I pay my bills. I pay my rent. I pay to keep an automobile on the road, no small task these days. When I need food, I have to pay for it. Which part of all this is not living in the real world?

One suspects living in the 'real world' entails getting your hands dirty for a living. But we can't all do that, it just wouldn't work.

Happily, we can attribute this attitude to a wonderful thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognise their errors. They therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own skills as above average.

Basically then, idiots refuse to believe they're wrong about anything because they're incapable of seeing that they're wrong about anything. A vicious circle, and a dangerous one too.

This now has the danger of sounding like snobbery, and claiming that anyone who hasn't been to University is an idiot. Not so. I know many smart people who hold few to no qualifications. They can however, see that self-improvement is a good thing, and following a chosen path is an admirable thing, and supporting your friends with their choices is the best thing.