Joseph’s post A New Joke gives an example of how various academic disciplines react to a single emergency event. The joke lies in the fact that they’re all about equally useless. It reminded me of a little talk I used to give to high-school seniors about their prejudice against a vocational curriculum as opposed to the college prep curriculum. So many students mistakenly choose the latter because they think the former is for “dumb” students, for those not in the in-crowd. That prejudice, I told them, is why there are so many bad doctors who would have been good practical nurses; lousy lawyers, who would have been great mechanics, etc. Snobbery not only turns out poor professionals; it also downgrades standards in higher education.

 

I explained that “intelligence” can be concrete as well as abstract. The courses proper to university learning are mostly abstract; those proper to vocational college are more concrete. Further, the latter are generally higher paid than the former because they are more obviously useful to us. When I have a broken pipe in the kitchen and water is going everywhere, I don’t want someone with a degree in civil engineering; I want a good plumber—and I’m willing to pay!

 

No less important is the contribution that job satisfaction makes to personal happiness. How can you be happy if you work at some profession every day for which you are ill-suited? If your performance is, at very best, mediocre? If your colleagues have no respect for you? And what sorts of wrong directions might you not take in order to raise the low self-esteem that would be with you 24/7? How would you cope with the constant anxiety that professional insecurity would surely bring? Having made one huge mistake by a perverted view of human “worth,” what other, more tragic mistakes might you not also make? That kind of view causes utterly false values that destroy virtue—do you think you could have such a view in only one area of your life? Wouldn’t you, by necessity, extend it to other areas, to other people? Your own children, for example. And finally, doesn’t snobbery also cause that phenomenon of “inverse” snobbery as a necessary defense? People do not adopt the presumed moral superiority of false victimization unless they’ve been taught to believe that they’re somehow actually inferior to other, “better”-educated people.

 

“Intelligence” in the context of education and job preparation is of two kinds, not one. Try this: an imaginary man is having a heart attack in a restaurant. Without pausing to consider anything else, what is your response? Do you “wish” you were able to understand what causes heart attacks? Do you “wish” you were a qualified EMT so you could help him? Is one response any “better”—more valuable—than the other? And does this example tell you anything about yourself that might help you make a life-forming decision that could turn out to be irrevocable? With the exception of making a decision about marriage, no other choice will so affect both you, personally, and society, generally. It’s crucial to get past the illusions that your notions about “intelligence” and “self-image” have given you, and be honest with yourself.

 

We’re all intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical. How do you respond first?

Intellectual: What did he eat?

Emotional: Oh, that poor man!

Spiritual: God, please help this man.

Physical: Call 911