Education
Jan 05, 2010 by
DaveC
[URL=http://mapdigital.com/events/siemens/sc09/vodf_present.html?webcast_id=suchyta&speed=high&player_type=Flash]One of my wife's former students.[/URL]
Of course,she is awesomely smart but is she an [i]intellectual[/i]?
My understanding is that by studying science or medicine, rather than telling other people how to run their lives, or critiquing the political process, she is disqualififed as being an intellectual. That somehow seems unfair to me. She placed 2nd or 3rd in the National History Fair in middle school.
And now is she permanently obligated to pursue her hypothesis? Is this like a contractual deal with whatever university she will attend? It looks like Northwestern or Chicago but can she change her mind about what she wants to do? I suppose that to do really great things, a person has to be really committed early on. Or perhaps not. At what point in our educational system do you have to you decide what to study?
Comments
Jan 05, 2010, 22:01:10 libjpn wrote:
WTF? Disqualified from being an intellectual? That's just low self esteem talking. I'm sure that's what [url=http://lefarkins.blogspot.c...]Glenn Reynolds[/url] and Ann Althouse are aiming at when they try to analyze Obama's body language using the White House Flickr feed. Unfortunately, an intellectual is judged on their insight and logical coherency of their output, which puts both of them out of the running
She's not obligated to pursue her hypothesis, that's the beauty of university and one of the things that gets folks who think that intellectual is some sort of club created to keep folks down upset. The US system, unlike most other tertiary systems, allows people to change willy-nilly. I ended up changing my major either 5 times or 8 times depending on how you count.
Jan 05, 2010, 22:10:18 John Thullen wrote:
An impressive individual, Dave.
"she is disqualified as being an intellectual."
What?
No, the damaging anti-intellectual tide sweeping America (from the right, but the left has done damage too) will qualify her as an over-educated, effete elitist who seeks to spirit away our precious bodily fluids for DNA analysis.
If she earns a degree in history as well, or switches her area of study to history (my son is majoring in biochemistry rather than history {his first love}), she can be accused of being a pointed-headed intellectual poobah, perchance to have opinions, which if they differ from Sean Hannity's, will be deemed unAmerican, antiAmerican, Communist, fascist, and liable to lead to the Caliphat being established in South Carolina.
Unless, of course, she becomes a dyed-in-the-wool conservative of the type that infests the land now, and dons a funny hat to protest against taxes and for guns --- then she and her multiple graduate degrees will be harnessed to accuse ME, the quintessential underachieving C-student, of being a dangerous public intellectual.
I admire driven people who decide early on what they want to study and do. Then, if they change their minds, they have the years and the discipline to pursue new paths to their successful end.
The, there are the late bloomers, who finally get it together.
Perhaps if this young lady discovers in my DNA the secret to living for 300 years, I'll have time to figure out what it is I should be doing, since playing centerfield for the Yankees seems out of reach now.
Jan 05, 2010, 23:41:01 JanieM wrote:
"Intellectual" is a fuzzy word. I don't get why anyone would care whether other random people think they're "intellectual." But the wikipedia entries on "intellectual" and "intellgentsia" (especially the not at all recent Russian origin of the term) are interesting if you care. According to wikipedia, “intellectual” does encompass people who work in science and medicine.
If you're objecting that some self-appointed intellectuals in the blogosphere or on TV are doing boundary maintenance to make their club look more exclusive, well, it seems like a waste of energy to me. Who cares?
As to obligation.....I went to college and grad school 40 years ago, never had a single job that had anything to do with the field I studied. I went back and took some classes (in a different field) 10 years ago and again 5 years ago (yet another field). Five years ago it was linguistics. I had a great time and was encouraged to go to grad school -- with the fatal warning that there are no jobs, so grad school wouldn't get me to where I could make a living, especially if I wanted to stay in Maine, which I do.
Point being: I can't imagine there has ever been a time in history when there is more openness to or opportunity for changing your mind and studying something else, on into old age if you have a mind to do it. So where are you getting the idea that this student is under some kind of permanent obligation?
I'd be truly curious to hear the answer to that question, but I have a couple of guesses.
One would be scholarship money. Neither of my kids majored in any kind of science, so I'm not familiar with what goes on with top high school kids headed for college in the sciences these days. It wasn't very common when I was young for undergraduate scholarships to require sticking with a certain major, but I can easily imagine that it's more common now, especially in the sciences, where there’s so much money to be made in pharmaceuticals, DNA research, etc. So if the funding entity is one that wants to get the science done, I can easily imagine the condition being imposed that you stick with the science, or lose the money.
The other "obligation" would be from pressure from both oneself, and the adults in one’s world. Again, I didn't see this in relation to academics with my kids, but I saw plenty of it in the sports world during the years when my kids played high school basketball. There's huge pressure on kids, if they have some talent, to play their sport (singular! there is a lot of pressure these days to specialize rather than to be the old-fashioned, formerly much admired 3-sport varsity player) year-round, to play on AAU teams in the off-season (or even during the school season, for kids younger than high school), etc. etc. This isn't a "legal" obligation (like conditions attached to scholarship money), but if it can be serious in sports, I can well imagine that it can be serious when directed at a nationally-recognized young science researcher. If that's what's going on with this girl, it's too bad she doesn't have some adults in her world who can help her keep her perspective on what would happen if she decided she didn't want to do this kind of work after all. Or if she’s decided that already.
Jan 06, 2010, 00:08:11 JanieM wrote:
Slight correction lest I libel AAU: middle school kids where I live do tend to play on 2 basketball teams in the winter, one a school team and the other a "travel team," whereas high school kids play on only their high school team. But the travel teams aren't AAU, which doesn't (or at least didn't) run teams/leagues during the school season.
Jan 06, 2010, 01:32:00 russell wrote:
That's a smart and accomplished young woman.
My general observation is that people who can figure stuff out, who can articulate whatever it is they've figured out, and who can bring their insight to fruition in some way that impinges constructively on the real world can pretty much do whatever they want to do in life.
Those are, in fact, the skills needed to do whatever it is you want to do in life. What else is needed?
Software pundit Joel Spolsky calls this combination of attributes "really smart and gets things done". It's his metric for hiring people.
If you're smart and you can get things done, bob's your uncle.
And if you're smart and you can get things done, you probably don't really care all that much if somebody else thinks you're an intellectual or not.
No need to worry about it on her behalf.
Jan 06, 2010, 01:35:42 russell wrote:
And no, she's not required to pursue her hypothesis. Any arrangement she has with whatever university she goes to is their business. If the deal is not to her liking, she'll go somewhere else.
Maybe she'll pursue biochemistry. Maybe she'll play jazz piano. Maybe she'll get married and have eight kids. Maybe she'll become an investment banker.
It's up to her. There probably isn't anything standing in her way, and if there is, she'll have to figure it out.
Jan 06, 2010, 02:25:25 nous wrote:
She reminds me a lot of the BioSci students that I teach.
Questions about specialization and pressure and whatnot are complicated because its all pretty context-dependent. I think a lot of the kids I teach that want to go into BioSci feel the pressure to decide early and to go all out because it's so hard to get into med school, (and because, ultimately, the people who run med schools are themselves the product of these pressures and see it as a form of validation). It's close to the same for BioSci research because in order to be a successful researcher you have to get grants and the people who award them are looking for this sort of person.
It drives me nuts because it is so hard to get these students to relax and really explore a topic -- especially one that is not directly connected to BioSci and some notion of Science In Service to People (tm). They become very risk-averse because with competition as fierce (and shallowly measured) for those top spots they do not want to meet any challenges that might damage their GPA and make them look bad on paper. The same is true for many student whose aim throughout is to get into a professional school (MBA, Law).
But if you get a student outside of these particular groups it's much as everyone remembers, just with some added contact neuroses from their very driven roommates who are part of that first group.
Well, except for the students who are in college by the skin of their financial teeth, working to stay in, and the first in their family to attend. They, too, feel pressure to get something practical out of their education, but that is an entirely different sort of pressure to succeed and specialize.
As far as what constitutes an intellectual...off the top of my head I would say that it mostly just requires a sense of intellectual curiosity about things beyond one's own immediate context, and by this standard I've met engineers and scientists that qualify and Humanities professors that don't, so it seem to me to be at best tangentially related to what field one pursues.
Jan 07, 2010, 10:01:28 DonaldJ wrote:
This sounds like C.P. Snow stuff--two cultures and all that, with the humanists looking down their noses at the sort of people who knew the laws of thermodynamics. He was talking about England several decades ago. I don't know if it's true here. Somewhere online recently I was reading someone say that to rise to the top of some corporations, you had to be white, Midwestern, male, come from a working class background and have an engineering degree. No idea if that's true, but anyway, people's views of who is elite and who isn't probably varies.
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