Anti-

I have, over the course of the past few years, discovered a strange bent in the perception of people who find out I am a part of higher education. There is a large contingent of the expected response of "wow! You must be smart!" (which may or may not actually be the truth--I certainly feel pretty dumb most of the time), but the longer I go, the more I receive a different response.

Case in point:

Em came in to town this weekend, and we had a pretty fantastic time watching television on the internet and eating bagels and shopping all the cheap stores in Manhattan. On Saturday, we had been wandering about like hobos with backpacks and bags weighing us down, and we found ourselves desperately tired and in dire want of a cold, frosty beer.

Now, the problem of beer in New York is one that I harp on rather constantly in my day-to-day, but I will here leave the discussion with: the elusive good beer is prohibitively expensive, and the rest seems to exist so that people who are too weak to drink liquor can get wasted on Busch or Coors Light. Having gotten drunk on cheap beer more than once in my life, I must wholly and utterly denounce this practice.

The bar we went to advertised a happy hour special of 2-dollar pints on select beers. Upon inquiry, it was discovered that in addition to the standby collection of Budweiser, Busch and Coors, they also had PBR. PBR is not good beer, but if it's cold enough it can taste like happy memories of Portland and of Fourth of July nights.  Em and I ordered a couple, and settled in.

We had not been there long before two gentlemen sidled up to our table to make conversation, and here in this conversation is where my anecdote returns to the point.

Man number 1 was moderately drunk, and his friend, Lou, was totally sober and fairly concerned that his pal was being an ass. He wasn't, at first. Then he asked if Em and I were in school. It turns out he meant college, because upon learning that I was in graduate school his face puckered in on itself and he spat, "in what?"  I told him. He turned to Em and said, "Didn't anyone ever tell her that's completely useless?"

If  I had said I was a college student in communications, or attending nursing school, the conversation would almost certainly have continued without a glitch. But my advanced degree in the humanities was intensely offensive to this fellow, and he was not afraid to let me know that.

I would say responses like this are disheartening, but they aren't--at least not for me. I've never held pretenses about the practical applications of a humanities degree, and consider the point rather to be education for its own sake, since that seems to lead naturally into practical skills of higher reasoning. But it does mark an attitude that I never noticed as an undergrad; an attitude that I now see in my own students that implies, somehow, that education is only useful if it gets you a job, or if it teaches you the facts.

I could go into my extended lecture about facts, and the false reliance on them, here, but instead I'm going to go read something useless.