Part of the whole ‘Higher education is just one step on the career path’ syndrome?
wow, I’m lost for words.
Pride the signifier has remained, Pride the signified has died out.
Absolutely. Education is not seen as end and in and of itself. It is not even beneficial on its own. It is seen merely as a means to an end. If your education does not help you in getting a career then it is seen as worthless. Personal Enrichment means nothing, unless you are talking about cash.
(But I might be seeing things with my own jaundiced eye. 
)
Why do i feel as though anyone who uses a service like that will, somehow, do very poorly in whatever career they follow? It seems to me to be self defeating, ultimately, to shy away from learning and work to… hmm, work.
I think your idealistic side is showing. People cut corners and still make big profits every day.
We had this discussion before. 
You hire someone to put a roof on your house, you wouldn’t stand for it if they just threw a tarp over and said “pay me now”.
I find myself agreeing with Pirsig here, there is alot to be said for the idea of quality, that it is not entirely relativistic, in that one can pursue it as an end in itself and take from it some intrinsic reward. That some people will never know that, I pity them. That those same people I pity might have to operate on any of us one day, well, that should scare you.
Whatever you guys are talking about, I agree. 
sometimes, like at drexel university, the liberal arts college doesnt have enough students because nobody wants to learn that stupid crap, for some reason nobody wants to read a bunch of freaking poetry that is written in freaking middle english.
but drexel doesnt want anybody to know that its wasting a bunch of money on stupid poetry classrooms so they force me to sit through the most boring discussion possible about alllll the possible things that the stupid poem could be a symbol for, but isnt.
if i wasnt so awesome at writing papers, i would gladly give my teacher a metaphorical middle finger with this website. i would prefer if my brain did not contain any shakespeare, and ive actually succesfully purged my memory of the numerous papers ive written about his crap.
Why is everyone so suprised? You don’t write your own posts do you?
Post.com – 100% custom posts.
All our posts are written from scratch and thoroughly researched according to your specifications. Our writers do not cut and paste unlike other companies. Your posts will pass turnitin.com or any anti-plagiarism software. Our rates are the lowest in the industry. Dare to compare.
Well it take a bit more sophistication than that. It all has to look good. Its all about glamour, with all of its implications of compelling illusions. You are a CEO you carefully lie about your finances to look better to Wall Street and you collect a massive bonus. The patient and wise thief prospers.
Well you know what the call the person who graduates at the bottom of his medical class?
Doctor.
So, your standard is if one makes a profit. Mine is a bit higher than that (or at least, more abstract).
I just want to clarify that personally I don’t advocate profit as the ultimate goal. I see this as a highly placed goal in America. I see deceit and mediocrity in every large business. It is no longer a question of if a business is rotten it’s a question of how rotten is it.
Excellence, distinction and fineness are all noble and useful goals, but I don’t see them being significantly advocated. This only makes us more and more hollow and insubstantial. A society that primarily values profits is a society in decline.
Consumerism is a temporary balm to an aching void that it can never fill. We can never get enough of what we really don’t need. Yet society is going more and more insane and it only accelerates. You point towards symptoms of the madness and I try to name the cause.
Well, I didn’t really think you were advocating profit above everything else, though I would say such an argument would seem practical in a pragmatic world. I think neither of us sees anything inherently wrong with profit, but to center one’s life around it, to build an altar in its name and worship to the exclusion of all else, that is lacking something.
In fact I would go further. Use MTV as an example. To steal a line I read somewhere recently, ‘the increasingly materialistic and hedonistic images and lifestyles championed on MTV serve no other purpose than to indoctrinate our youth into a state of constant consumerism and pleasure seeking behavior. The sales pitch is clear, pleasure is to be had solely from material things.’
There is no pride in consumption, there can be no sense of arete resulting from the ability to waste more stuff. What else is profit for, except to garner a never ending succession of useless crap? And if we must cheat, lie, and steal to have that crap, those extrinsic rewards, are we, and can we ever be, truly happy? Because extrinsic rewards can never serve as a bridge for intrinsic success, not defined by dead philosophers or bible thumpers, but by the individual self, each craving to be the best.