Don't Go To College

Plus! Don't Buy Into Pomo Feminism!
I like a kind of life where there is a seamlessness between "work" and "time off," where one loves one's work so much that the need for time off ceases to matter. No everyone can do it, but it's a good thing to do, at least for a few years. Right now I have almost no time off, and it’s OK, because my work is what I used to do in my time off. I recently went on a mini vacation to visit the moms and all I could think about is how I don’t want to go on vacation again for a long time. All I want to do is get on my feet financially, and immerse myself more deeply in the things I’m doing right now (cooking, becoming a better businesswoman). Obviously, I am in a very privileged spot right now, in that I work almost completely from home and get to snack all day long. A 14-hour day is not so bad if you can be in your undies and have no commute.

In addition to that, I think one reason I am able to be continually be refreshed by my work is that it uses my hands. So many of my friends are in the spot I was in 3 years ago – overeducated and completely unaware of how to make enough money to pay off the thousands of dollars of debt their education required while living a life that brings them any pleasure. So you are forced to take a shitty office job just to make enough to survive, and you keep on telling yourself that soon you will start on your "real career." I did that for a year while I was in cooking school and it was hell every step of the way.

After thinking about this a lot, it seems that one way around this is for a lot more people not to go to college
and to learn a skill instead. Whenever I get scared about money or the "economy" (a concept I don’t believe in, but whatever), I am comforted thinking that at least I have a skill that is necessary. People will always need to eat. I shudder at how close I came to becoming a women’s studies professor, because now I have a feeling that comes perilously close to contempt for the academic life, specifically for the women’s studies world (of course, now it’s increasingly called the "gender studies" department, because we’re not allowed to use the word woman anymore). Before I get back to why 75% of people shouldn’t go to college, let direct a little vitriol specifically at the WST dept:

I feel that postmodernism has done a great disservice to feminism by brainwashing a lot of great, political people with the belief that (among other things) debating the socially constructed state of "womanhood" (the word "woman" must always be in quotes in the women’s studies department) and the necessity for post-binary gender choices is actually contributing something to the feminist cause. I wish I had had classes in college like "what to do when the president of the US tells women that they cannot have a say in what happens to their wombs" instead of classes like WST 202: Advanced introduction to feminist theory: "This course aims to introduce students to some of the key concepts troubling
contemporary feminist theory, including questions of kinship, nationality, religion, law, violence, race, masculinity, virtual reality, sexuality, and the body. We will consider the contentious issues that arise when we think about the relationship between "theory" and "practice" (e.g. in the visual arts or in the political arena), as well as the question of how "feminism," a discourse founded upon distinct gender categories, interacts with, or is subsumed by, theoretical discourses with other, possibly conflicting, emphases: psychoanalysis, marxism, queer theory, post-colonial theory..."

Women are dying every day all around the world in ways large (my friend Susan, murdered by her boyfriend, died of "massive head trauma") and medium (pay differentials, abortion rights, inadequate child care, etc ad nauseum) because the feminist movement is talking about shit like this, and I can’t stand it anymore. It kills me that feminism, for many women of my generation especially, has become such a privileged, academicized affair. If any women’s studies majors leave the ivory tower and actually do some activism, it’s increasingly in spite of, not because of, their education. (Another disturbing trend is the re-writing of what constitutes "activism" in the pomo world – "burlesque" dancing, the s/m world, etc are now seen by some as a form of feminist political activism. Many still do see the wisdom of the boring stuff our mothers did – marching and letter-writing and consciousness-raising – but I guess
it’s just more fun to strip in front of a bunch of neo-frat boys in trucker hats and pretend you’ve done your feminist duty for the day.)

[ok, right here I have to say one thing, in deference to my friends who are part of this movement – yes, this neo-burlesque thing is inclusive of all sizes and shades of women, yeah, I know that. I was at a show last week and in between acts there was a stripper with lusciously rolling flesh. But STILL people. Are we really going to settle for that? Doesn’t it seem like the lowest common denominator – if we all get to take our clothes off in front of men, is that really a victory? I know Kathleen Hanna believes that it turns the male gaze around and all that, that when you are in control of the terms of your own objectification it somehow becomes empowering, especially for women who have been sexually abused...and I guess I can see it, a little bit. But it saddens me how important it’s becoming and how much time young feminists are spending thinking about it and doing it. I’m not an anti-sex feminist at all, and I resent the idea that women who are anti-porn or anti s/m somehow get labeled as anti-sex. Sigh. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.]

Right now I am out in the world living feminism. I’m figuring out how to run a feminist business and trying not to shy away from living up to all the requirements that come with wide open eyes -- that the paper towels
I use must be unbleached; that the food must be organic (and more importantly, local); that I must reject wearing the pretty white chef jackets in my closet and the hierarchy that they imply; that I must set boundaries with my clients and make enough money to survive; which means that I can’t feed all the starving activisty vegans I so desperately want to eat better -- for me feminism includes all these, because a feminism disconnected from class, environmental or practical concerns is a pretty shitty feminism. I’m thankful for my women’s studies education because now I have a lot of great books with titles like "Rewriting Sex" and I got to spend a whole year thinking and writing about "The Ecofeminist Vision in the Poetics of Adrienne Rich" and I also got to write a totally rad paper on the homoeroticism, racism, and corporatism of Abercrombie & Fitch ads – but in the end I’ve learned 10 times more by working at a feminist restaurant than I did sitting in classes and doodling and piling up debt by the second.

So, I’m anti-college. I think it’s a trap, and I think it’s heartbreaking that it’s become so mandatory. It takes us out of the real world and convinces us that it is the real world, and that’s the major cause of why we are so fucked up – bad priorities. I’ve been talking about all this in relation to women’s studies, but that’s because that’s what I know and think is particularly tragic, but let’s take it in another direction.

My shitty-ass school was known for science-y and business-y stuff. So let’s say you were an economics

major or something. Do you really think it’s that interesting to study money? No, probably you got into it because you thought you could make money. Here is the important point about this:

college tricks you into thinking that the careers it trains you for are the only ones out there. It simultaneously erases any imaginative thoughts you might have had about how you could live your life and replaces them with a framework for thinking about how to live in the world that is fundamentally flawed and not sustainable.

It’s completely ridiculous to elevate jobs that require the mind (= jobs that you have to go to college to do) so far above jobs that require the hands. Not only does it trap you because when you get out you are forced to take these spirit-crushing shit jobs, but it ruins you because you inevitably develop the idea that because you went to college you are somehow more important than, say, the Mexican woman who takes out the trash in your cubicle and works 10 times harder than you and makes 5% of what you do (and you’re only making $20,000, which is not even enough to have lunch out every day, which you still do, paying with your Visa and gossiping with your office pals in the break room, because what else are you going to do, bring your lunch? <---- do you see how you get
trapped in these thoughts?). Before you know it, you’ve bought into all these lies and have forgotten all your dreams and the sense of possibility about what a life could be you had as a child.


It seems to me that the only way to reverse this trend is to forget college and elevate trades and jobs requiring hands-on skills to a much higher level. This would immediately alleviate so many problems, most of them class or race related. Here’s a list of ways I think life would be better if we went back to a skill-dependent economy instead of a fake service/computer-based economy:

  • We wouldn’t all be buying those ugly-ass IKEA (or Wal-Mart, for that matter) tables and crap because we would value the work of local skilled carpenters and would have real furniture.
  • We wouldn’t eat such shit because we would recognize that food is not just something you do to keep alive while sitting at the computer/phone/desk all day.
  • Because more people would be working at useful skills, we would barter more and thus be less dependent on money.
  • We would learn to have real communities again because we would be forced to buy more stuff locally, from craftspeople instead of from huge superstores.
  • This would lead to discussions about what’s really needed in communities (because we would be interacting with people we valued more as artisans rather than just cashiers, and so it would be easier to chat about real things, which naturally would lead to the state of the local community).
  • This would lead to better politicians being elected, since the voters would care more and feel they had more of a stake in their communities.
  • This would lead to better local laws being passed.
  • This would lead to healthier environments, better wages, improved social conditions, and economic justice.
  • This would lead to citizens realizing that they hold the keys to true democracy.
  • Obviously, then we would all vote for Kucinich and with a vegan president, no PATRIOT act, and a Dept. of Peace, life would become so unbearably wonderful that we would all drift away on clouds of nirvana.

So. the result of a few good kids not going to college could be nothing less than humanity reaching the apex of human civilization!


November 2003

Links:

alternet article on college debt

excellent book about college and debt, Generation Debt. Read it for the tiny interview with me where I reveal how much college debt I have, which, when an excerpt ran in the Village Voice, garnered me much unwanted sympathy from my richie clients!