CSotD: There are no philosopher-plumbers, either
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This time of year brings on a flood of "grads without jobs" cartoons. Graduation is one of those must-draw occasions, I suppose, but "grads without jobs" cartoons are like the "bear trap in the fireplace" cartoons that come out every Christmas.
Seen it. What else ya got?
I like Liza Donnelly's take, in part because it's not about whether the dog has a job lined up. And in part because it's silly. And in part because, under that gown and mortarboard, nobody knows you're a dog.
And "nobody knows you're a dog" became a modern classic because it operates on a couple of levels: The silly level of dogs on computers and the anonymity of the Internet, and the more troubling "imposter syndrome" level of "what if they find out I'm really just a dog?"
Liza's got a slideshow of grad cartoons over at her Forbes' column site, some of which, indeed, reference the no-job issue, but not in the sense of anybody feeling ripped off by it, or of it being new or surprising or anything but part of the process.
Moreover, in her comments there, she not only links to evidence showing that the "where's my job?" issue is not all that valid to begin with, but says, "My college diploma did not give me my job, it did not teach me how to
draw cartoons, but it taught me many other things. I already knew how to
laugh; I learned other important things that a cartoonist needs to
know. Things like psychology, philosophy, biology, literature, strange
behavior, funny hats and how to party."
Bingo.
The job thing is nothing new, in large part because college is not a job-training program except in some very specific areas like mass comm, education and business, and the latter two don't give you much to trade on at a bachelor level, while, as noted here recently, mass comm is mostly drama school for kids who don't want to wind up doing dinner theater for the rest of their lives.
My father and grandfather both got jobs upon graduation, not because they lived in a different age but because they were engineering majors.
My own major was almost militantly unvocational. We read classical literature and philosophy and studied the history of science, and we joked that we were being trained for careers as philosopher-kings.
But of course we weren't being trained at all. Maybe Liza's dog went to college to be trained.
We were being taught, and taught how the world works and how to think and how to reason and argue logically, all things that don't add up to a hill of beans until you overlay them with something specific, like law school, which several of my classmates did, or a teaching degree. One fellow went into costume design and I don't know how much Euclid and Aristotle helped, but I think he won an Oscar or was nominated or something.
And a couple chickened out and became professors.
As we approached graduation, the abyss beyond did yawn. At that point, I had a very pregnant wife and no discernible job skills, and I proposed one day that we ought to have a joint program with the local tech school so that, in addition to reading Plato, we could also learn to repair things. I wasn't serious in the sense that I expected it to happen, but, then again, I wasn't joking, either.
If that system were in place, we'd not only have more people like Samuel Johnson's friend Elizabeth Carter, who, he noted, "could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus," but perhaps we might have punched a hole in the nonsensical political and class divide between people who work with their hands and people who sit at desks.
However, no school can routinely turn out people as brilliant as Elizabeth Carter, and, too, there will always be people at each end of the spectrum, from technically gifted craftsman with no capacity for abstract thought to award-winning academicians who, in the words of George Wallace, "can't park a bicycle straight."
And let me be even more clear on this: It is not an issue of intelligence. It is an issue of how your brain is wired. My older brother spent a year or two at Annapolis, attempting to teach philosophy to midshipmen. Middies are unquestionably very bright people with a gift for academics, but he might as well have been speaking to them in Tagalog for all they were able to grasp of philosophy and for all that they wanted to hear him keep going.
Plato said "There will be no end to the troubles of the state or indeed of
humanity until philosophers become kings or until those we now call
kings really and truly become philosophers."
He said it in about 380 BC and it's 2013 AD now.
Which I suppose could mean that we're going to have to wait a while longer. Or it could mean something else.
In any case, il faut cultiver notre jardin.
(I learned that in college.)
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