I find in large designs the most beautiful lead up to a bang. Say there is a class that has a handful of functions. If you trace into any particular function it might do very little and then hand off to another function. The other function might do just a little more and then hand off to a function that terminates the stacking elegantly completing the task. These classes usually take careful planning and down right experience to design.

Then there is simple logic that doesn’t need careful design.  There are many ways to do the same thing, but to me some just look better than others.  I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe other coders have experienced what I’m talking about. I’ll call it Feng Shui of coding. I’ll give an example. I like


food = "tacos";
if (vegetarian)
{
    food = "tofu tacos";
}


but I don’t like


if (vegetarian)
{
    food = "tofu tacos";
}
else
{
    food = "tacos";
}


I have more subtle preferences too.  I put spaces after my if, for, and while statements before the parenthesis. I also space between my operators.  I think it just looks right.

Take a look at a source file of lua. Now take a look at a source file from SDL. They are written in the same language, but they are so different. Lua likes squished short functions. SDL likes spaced out phrases in fewer functions. The casing is also drastically different.

I find this interesting. It might invoke a giant who the hell cares from others, but then again I’m a source code junkie. I rather enjoy in my leisure browsing the code of say Android or even the Linux kernel. I always think a coder’s style says a lot about how they even solve problems.  It’s interesting to see what ‘greats’ prefer. Which brings us back to the book Beautiful Code. That’s what it is all about. You get to look at what some of the great problem solvers have to offer.

I have thought for a while that source code can be art. I’m serious here. There are many elements that come into play. There is the overall style (curls at the end or on the next line). There’s spacing and casing. There’s the verbose license headers and the “Fred made this” headers. There is the witty one line comment. There is the part that I find the most intriguing–why it was written. Is it an MP3 decoder that is legally gray in binary form (unlicensed that is)? Is it a reverse engineered structure of a media streaming protocol Apple was keeping proprietary? Is it a home brew implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework for another operating system than Windows? I find that the most beautiful.

Don’t fool yourself: social consciousness has become commoditized, as evidenced by culturally aware works by Cory Doctorow like The Makers and, to a small extent, Little Brother. I talked about that a little in my post on STUFF. More so, proof that it has been directly commoditized is directly exemplified by CauseWorld. This is the only program I’m aware of that does this, but I’m sure it’s not the only one that exists.

If you’re not familiar with it – CauseWorld allows users to donate “Karma” to specific charities. Karma represents real money that sponsors (read: companies who want you to buy what they sell) will donate to causes you choose. Karma costs no money for the users, but, and get this, because it’s goddamn genius, karma is earned via GPS located check-in locations in stores. Yeah, that’s right. Big companies are basically saying that they will donate money to charities that you choose if you go to their stores and spend a little time there.

There’s no way that you can say that this system isn’t stamped, signed, and delivered proof that social consciousness is a commodity that can be traded or sold. Whether it’s ultimately a good thing for the charities is hard to argue against – it probably is, and it’s certainly an easy way to get people into your stores for companies – it’s basically the same thing as “Pay-Per-Click” advertising on Google. Companies pay charities for store visitors, just like they pay Google for visitors to their website.

The real debate is whether it’s good for users, both financially and mentally. Sure, if it’s just a bonus of doing their normal shopping – they were going to go to The Gap anyway, so that feel good feeling they get for helping out is just a bonus for buying a new pair of Gap 1969 jeans, right? But you can’t argue that it doesn’t commodity social consciousness. It puts a price on it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, even if it fits with the major first tenant of capitalism: everything has a price. But price isn’t the end all be all with everything.

So although our coffee-loving friend at the Mars Café might rock his free trade coffee grounds because he believes that he is supporting farmers and protecting the earth by doing so – he’s still buying his social consciousness with his dollar. Some might argue that he was going to buy coffee with his dollar either way, so it’s better that he buy the “right” coffee, but “right” is an appeal to “All I want” or “taste” (if you’ll allow me to through in some art lingo while also making a great pun). It’s the same thing. Just because his “All I want” is better justified, it still doesn’t change what it is. It’s taste.

And taste is a commodity that’s traded like any other. It’s socially created by “education” in proper taste, both in voiced and unvoiced lessons. Voiced by traditional education in university, commercials, segments on the nightly news, parent, friends, and that ubiquitous hippie girl you know who is always into a new cause. But the unvoiced lessons are probably more powerful, since we’re inundated with so much talk nowadays that after awhile it all becomes noise.

The unvoiced lessons are the ones you learn when trying to impress a girl by breaking into a higher class (and the pants of said higher class). The way she smiles when you pick up the check for the expensive wine, the way she frowns when you can’t. That tug of her lip, those glances she planned for you to catch but acts coy when you catch them – it’s all calculated by who’s giving what to whom, and for what reasons, even if it’s all just lonely neurons firing in the dark subconscious. Unvoiced lessons are given by physical social signals.

To speak to my point, I’d like to bring in a snobby literary theorist, which is a bit awkward, considering this conversation is essentially a discussion of how snobbery is created, commoditized, and why it probably isn’t a good thing, but, alas, I’m not above it if it speaks to my own ends. Thus, I submit to our conversation the introduction to Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu. You can find a PDF of this introduction here. I hope it stays up (even though it’s probably under copyright) because I don’t want to just throw things at you that you have to go out of your way to find. In my experience, most won’t make much extra effort to go out of their way to prove someone else’s point.

Anyway, Bourdieu says that:

Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin. The relative weight of home background and of formal education (the effectiveness and duration of which are closely dependent on social origin) varies according to the extent to which the different cultural practices are recognized and taught by the educational system, and the influence of social origin is strongest—other things being equal—in ‘extra-curricular’ and avant-garde culture. To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers.

Here we see Bourdieu making the point that taste is based on education, both formal and social. Although he’s talking about art, the line between “high” art and “low” art has been blurred even more since the time of his writing. I would submit that we now view products as a form of art, and that our tastes, controlled by both formal and social education, shape our views on those products. This fits very easily into Bourdieu’s idea structure. Note that he even uses the word “consumers” in the last sentence of the above quote. He goes on to talk about how we build these tastes:

The logic of what is sometimes called, in typically ‘pedantic’ language, the ‘reading’ of a work of art, offers an objective basis for this opposition. Consumption is, in this case, a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code. In a sense, one can say that the capacity to see (voir) is a function of the knowledge (savoir), or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception…A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason.

Here he builds on the concept we’re discussing – he mentions that specific method in which education about taste takes place. He points out that decoding taste is a matter of knowing the specific cultural markers that both define that taste, but also teach it to us. This is what I mean when I’m talking about the cute girl who bites her lip at you when you make the “right” (read: expensive) cultural, artistic, or, more importantly, brand decision. She gives you a cultural marker in order to teach you that you are on the right path. This serves as motivation for you to learn how to appreciate the arcane and encoded appreciation for that specific brand or product. We also taught these things formally, though voiced communication, by professors and celebrities yakking in commercials about charities.

In the last sentence of this quote, he mentions that a beholder who is unable to interpret the code is left without understanding. This is your father, my parents, the apathetic young – anyone who is unable to culturally discern between brand X and brand Y. They have not yet noticed or been taught the cultural significance, as well as the rewards, for that distinction.

Moving on:

An art which ever increasingly contains reference to its own history demands to be perceived historically; it asks to be referred not to an external referent, the represented or designated ‘reality’, but to the universe of past and present works of art. Like artistic production, in that it is generated in a field, aesthetic perception is necessarily historical, inasmuch as it is differential, relational, attentive to the deviations (écarts) which make styles. Like the so-called naive painter who, operating outside the held and its specific traditions remains external to the history of the art, the ‘naive’ spectator cannot attain a specific grasp of works of art which only have meaning—or value—in relation to the specific history of an artistic tradition. The aesthetic disposition demanded by the products of a highly autonomous field of production is inseparable from a specific cultural.

Here we see the next step and it’s easier to understand why I think Bourdieu has a place in our discussion. He’s talking about self-referential art here, the kind of art that is only valid as place in an artistic timeline. This is a loose definition of taste – the only way to say that one type of coffee is better than another type of coffee is to be educated in the timeline of coffee itself – that is, to write one’s personal story of coffee consumption. Now, this isn’t quite what Bourdieu is saying here – I don’t want to misuse him – however, the idea of creating a cultural connoisseur and becoming an expert in self-referential art is the same: we learn the process of distinction, the value of the process itself, and thus understand the idea of taste. After that, what taste is specifically important can be defined by any who is willing to produce more arcane cultural markers:

This mastery is, for the most part, acquired simply by contact with works of art—that is, through an implicit learning analogous to that which makes it possible to recognize familiar faces without explicit rules or criteria—and it generally remains at a practical level; it is what makes it possible to identify styles, i.e., modes of expression characteristic of a period, a civilization or a school, without having to distinguish clearly, or state explicitly, the features which constitute their originality. Everything seems to suggest that even among professional valuers, the criteria which define the stylistic properties of the ‘typical works’ on which all their judgements are based usually remain implicit.

He goes on to discuss a bit more what exactly defines this sense of taste, how it is learned, and I’m going to gloss over that in hopes of brevity. It’s there in link if you’d like to read it. However, once he’s moved past that, he makes the most interesting and telling addition to our discussion yet. Because there are points that connect with our discussion all the way through, the easiest way to draw these out is to go through Bourdieu’s text alongside our discussion:

The pure aesthetic is rooted in an ethic, or rather, an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world, which may take the form of moral agnosticism (visible when ethical transgression becomes an artistic parti pris) or of an aestheticism which presents the aesthetic disposition as a universally valid principle and takes the bourgeois denial of the social world to its limit.

This says that brands and products are morally agnostic and therefore their own thing. However:

The detachment of the pure gaze cannot be dissociated from a general disposition towards the world which is the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic necessities—a life of ease—that tends to induce an active distance from necessity.

This says that taste is based on economics.

Although art obviously offers the greatest scope to the aesthetic disposition, there is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying, refining and sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert itself, no area in which the stylization of life, that is, the primacy of forms over function, of manner over matter, does not produce the same effects.

Discerning people are shaped as discerning people, but as they live the discerning life, they get more discerning. Connoisseurism breeds more connoisseurism, which was my original point in the first post.

And nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even ‘common’ (because the ‘common’ people make them their own, especially for aesthetic purposes), or the ability to apply the principles of a ‘pure’ aesthetic to the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing or decoration, completely reversing the popular disposition which annexes aesthetics to ethics.

Here he talks about adding aesthetic status on objects that are banal or common – making something cool because it fits in with the tastes you’ve been educated to think are cool. This is directly applies to advertising and brand allegiance.

In fact, through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose, the different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment, are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes and class fractions.

This inspires the ideas of different brands for different classes, with different levels of connoisseurism for those classes. Aspiring to, or reaching a brand or product with higher and more specific taste elements makes people learn how to find those elements in other brands, desire them, but also fetishize those things as if they matter.

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.

We think we are classy because we like brands that are supposed to be classy. We also like things based on what class we’d like to join, and think that by liking a higher class of goods, we attempt to join a higher class.

Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.

Choosing companies, products, and brands on a regular basis, operating in a discerning mode, builds the behavior of discerning people.

The allegiance is not to the brand itself – that’s a short sighted and silly idea. The allegiance is to connoisseurism, the idea that taste is something true, and that there is a better and a less good. The allegiance is to the idea of rank, of file, of inequality. For without inequality, there can be no better and no worse. The allegiance is to distinction.

And this allegiance to distinction is what captivates us. It’s an old story, the story of the haves and the have nots, the difference between thriving and mere survival.

Does the addition of these ideas about artistic taste link up with the ideas of products in your mind? Please share your thoughts in the comments and WE’LL TALK.

But then, BAM! The last piece is added, and there it is, a whole body of thought seems to spring from nowhere, like Proust’s madeleine or that philosopher who had a sudden realization when stepping on a bus. In literature, it seems like that could be called “theme.” In life, maybe you could call it coincidence, or maybe realization, since in life stuff feels more random and less crafted than in stories, even though our brains make us think there is causation even when there isn’t any. Hey, it’s cool, it’s hard to fight that feeling. It’s, like, evolution, baby.

Anyway, the thing I want to talk about today built like what I’m talking about above – a list of seemingly random things my brain was doing without my knowledge or consent, before presenting it to me as a constructed whole. I don’t know exactly when it started, but I know the first time I really thought or talked about it:
I was at a local coffee shop about two years ago in Des Moines, near Drake University, called the Mars Café. I was there for my brother’s college graduation party and while I was there, I learned that the guy who was running the place, one of the managers, was one of my brother’s high school buddies.

I’d been thinking a lot about coffee at that time, as well as wine and beer. In the last few years in America (probably more than that on the coasts, but culture is slower in Iowa) people are suddenly taking a great interest in cultivating a taste in beverages. People know about different types of coffee preparation, what the adjective “woody” means when you’re talking about wine, and the difference between a micro-brewery and a mega-brewery. This is a quick simplification, but you know what I’m talking about. They are become connoisseurs.

I’d been thinking about that, wondering about the social implications of the thing, but I hadn’t been able to put any words to how I felt about it. If you’ve read more than one post on my site, you know that I’m big into figuring out what I feel about things and how things work. Sure, it’s a little narcissistic, but any free time usage is, if you slip down the slippery slope too far.

So, when I had the chance, I pulled my brother’s buddy aside to talk to him. He’s big on French pressed coffee, free trade grounds, organic stuff, the RIGHT way to make tea, and stuff like that. So I figured, since he dealt with people and tried to teach them about beverages every day, that he would be a good guy to ply with questions about the social effect of people caring about beverages.

So I asked him, “Do you think people caring about silly little things like coffee preparation is changing people to become discerning about other consumer products?”
There’s this bit in the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis about a concept Screwtape defines as the “All I want” idea. (“All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled.” – Screwtape Letter 17.) The idea is that people who have very specific tastes are perverted somehow, because they won’t accept other variations of what they want.

The reasoning behind why this becomes a personality perversion is that the item the person wants is very specific, but probably also small. The person who wants a beer, but any beer won’t do. Only a Boulevard Wheat Ale will do. Since Boulevard Wheat Ale is relatively inexpensive (it’s not Kristal champagne or anything), the person thinks that being specific about the type of beer is okay.

And it is okay, until the mental jump happens, the perversion, that makes the person feel justified for their specific wants, because what they want is “only” a specific inexpensive beer. But anything else won’t do. The person thinks that because their specific want is seemingly small, that it’s okay to be so specific about it.
You get the idea, I think. My concern is that by “educating” people about coffee, you’re teaching them to become “All I want” consumers. For coffee, wine, beer, and other things like that, it’s probably not a big deal. I’m not the guy who stands on the soapbox and yells about Starbucks ruining America singlehandedly.

However, what I am concerned about it that people who begin to become discerning think that their discerning-ness(?) makes them cultured and intelligent. They feel like they are making informed choices. I’m concerned that connoisseur-ism is becoming seen as a moral good, or worst, a right. My concern is that cultivating a discerning attitude in one area of your life makes it easier to become discerning in other areas. Kind of like learning one foreign language makes it easier to learn a second foreign language. You learn how to learn.

The worst implication of this, however, is that it separates reasonable, scientific, and logical intellectualism from what I would call “knowledge of taste.” It lumps the mathematical genius of Alan Turing into the same boat as some guy who can tell you exactly what a 1947 cabernet sauvignon from the south of France tastes like and why it’s better than a 1951, but not as good as a 1963 (obviously, I know jack about wine, so this is a made-up, silly example, but you get the idea.)

Anyway, to get back to the setting of this conversation, my brother’s friend didn’t really know what I was talking about. It’s possible he’d never considered it, but he’s a smart guy, so I doubt that. It’s more likely that I wasn’t able to get across what the hell I was trying to say. (I hope I’ve done a better job here.) We talked for a bit and I left him alone.

But the idea stayed with me. So add to this crystallization a second thing, a documentary I was watching on Hulu last night about corporations and their effects on our lives. The film is pretty over the top – it comes from the Michael Moore line of fear-mongering edu-tainment (hell, Michael Moore was even in the film), but Noam Chomsky was also in it, which redeemed it for me. And he said exactly what I’d been trying to voice when talking to my brother’s friend, but he took it to a new level of paranoia.

His point (paraphrased) basically was that corporations were manufacturing a brand, an idea, in people’s minds, and teaching them to care about it. He said that creating “All I want” type consumers was one of the highest goals, because not only does it make people keep buying stuff, but it also creates people who care deeply about what they buy. It develops products into fetishes because it gives people emotions connected with specific brands and specific products. It makes them care about things that don’t really matter, things that are just personal preferences, except the preferences aren’t personal. They are manufactured knowingly to sell stuff. That’s his idea, as I understand it.

I’m not sure that I buy into all that, because it seems a little far-fetched. I tend to turn everything into a huge idea, if only because I like a good, exciting story, but sometimes you have to step back and analyze the kool-aid you’re chugging down by the mouthful. But I still like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next man. Well, maybe even more than the next man.

So what’s in the juice here? Poison or sugar? Is there anything substantial to this? And if it is true, whether there are nefarious shadowy marketing executives behind it or not – what are the effects of a group of people who develop “discerning” tastes for specific things and become connoisseurs? Is there a deeper concern than someone getting pissed because their latte wasn’t made right? What implications does this concept have for our society? Where does that move us into the future?

I don’t know and I’d like to know.

No, it wasn’t those things at all, but still, as my eyes scrolled over his words, I couldn’t help but smile. All I was sure of was that his writing ability had little to do with my good mood as I read. Sure, it’d been a good day – I was full of a good meal, brimming with desert and caffeine, but that couldn’t be the total picture.

Then I realized – it was the first time I’d read any work of literary criticism since my graduation from my English MA program some nine months earlier. But that alone wasn’t the whole story. During my time spent studying literature and creative writing, the five years spent toward a BA and MA in English, I’d encountered and read many volumes and articles of literary criticism. And through I’d been impressed by many of them on a purely intellectual level, respected the brilliant minds that created them and hatched their concepts and formulated their impervious sentences, I didn’t enjoy a one of them, not one bit.

What then, made this Lewis book different? I was sure, even as I stared at the cover on the nearby table, that it had nothing to do with Lewis’s ideas, interesting though they were. The simple fact of it was that I was enjoying the book above and beyond the intellectual flirtation his ideas provided me.

After a few minutes wandering aimlessly around my living room, unsettling the cat from her perch in the fur-covered papasan chair, I began to understand that my enjoyment of the book stemmed from my motivation for reading it. I was reading it on the recommendation of a friend, an old man who runs the local used book shop. His bookspertise was such that I’d gone to consult with him for recommendations, to ask him for similar stories like the novel I am writing. I have specific ideas about the function of stories and literature, and after a two-hour conversation about those very topics, he asked me if I’d ever read Lewis’s critical work.

I hadn’t known it existed, up until that moment. He quickly found a musty old copy in the backroom and let me have it for a bargain at fifty cents. “No one else would even pay that much for it, smelling like it does,” he told me. I left it in the early summer sunlight for two days next to a glass jar of sun tea, and that cleared up the smell, leaving me with a serviceable, if stained, copy.

I was eager to read it, simply from his descriptions, but it was another three days before I got around to it, the business of daily life being what it is. When I finally approached the book, late last evening, I paused again, this time to trod down this line of reasoning, finally arriving to loom over the cat on the papasan chair, considering my motivations.

It seems to me that the reason I’ve enjoyed reading the book so much, is because it was useful to me. It directly pertained to what I was writing, and therefore, what I was doing with my daily life, that is, considering a novel and typing it out as the story developed. Lewis’s book, which contains ideas about how literature should be considered, was a timely and fortunate find.

A cup of coffee and a snack later, I was back on my couch, this time deep in thought.  I’d read many books in college that were useful to me, and some that were timely. A select few had even touched me in the way that Lewis’s had, but none inspired the sense of, dare I use such strong a term, joy, in me. But why?

I’m loathe to simply relay to you, as you sit there reading this essay, a simple string of my realizations, but the fiction writer in me must maintain a sense of flow and I confess that a string of realizations is the best way I know how to do that. I’ve never been a great scholarly or academic writer, so please bear with me: I’ve some things to say. The consideration of Lewis’s book created in me a wave of crystallization much in the way that Robert Pirsig describes in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it begins as an idea seed in an uncrystallized solution and from that idea seed a whole crystal seems to grow.

For a long time I’ve had a beaker, if you will allow me to continue with this ham-handed metaphor, of ideas about education, higher education specifically, and the experience reading the Lewis book provided the crystallization for me. Here, for your consideration, were the ideas floating in the beaker, in no particular order:

1. Recently my mother went back to university to finish the four year accounting degree she began three decades earlier. She chose to do this for the simple reason that in today’s job market, twenty-five years of accounting experience wasn’t enough for advancement when all she had was her associates. So she’s returned to school, not to take accounting classes, because those requirements are mostly fulfilled, with the exception of a few classes to become updated, but general education. Currently she’s taking Earth Science. Before that, Film Appreciation. All so she can complete her accounting degree and get a better accounting job.
2. I have, from five years of education, a decent amount of student loan debt that I’m having trouble paying off, despite the nonexistent salary my unpublished novelist career is paying me (ha, ha, my professors did warn me, after all, I can’t blame them completely). The wages from my day job as a technical writer for a small computer networking company are adequate, but it’s hard to make payments each month to a nameless loan company when I receive little day to day benefits of those payments except keeping credit agencies at bay.
3. When earning my MA I taught freshman composition for two years. My students thought every assignment I gave them was useless and dull, and though I assigned projects and papers anyhow, I agreed with them that what I was teaching them was useless and dull, though probably not for the same reasons. But I had no control over the scope of the curriculum. It was handed down to me from on high.

It was with these three concepts in mind that a consideration of Lewis’ work began the wave of crystallization in me. Beware: this is probably a polemic, I make no attempt to defend the reverse side of my ideas, but what I have to say is necessary all the same.

The formal education system in this country is vastly out of balance. In my own discipline, English, thousands more people are allowed to receive degrees than the market can support. Many of my graduate colleagues left school in hopes of finding a job within their discipline, as teachers, editors, or copywriters. But unfortunately, the face of the written language is changing. Multi-media, film, the web, even new forms of text like Twitter are changing the face of how we communicate. Our schools are vastly behind the times, graduating students without the proper tools to integrate themselves into the modern pace of business.

As technology advances the way humans communicate is changing. No longer can struggling writers attempt to support themselves in the dying print market. The old masters were all able to support themselves while working on novels through a steady stream of magazine short-story publishing. Even some of the recent writers, like Stephen King, got started this way. But even by the time he began his career the publishing world had changed enough, was already dying its slow death, and he had to support himself by teaching until he made his sweepstake-winning break.

But it’s not just publishing, or communication, that’s changed by technology. It’s our science, our trades, and everything else. The age old Greek idea (as well as medieval and renaissance) of a well rounded, university education is sadly outdated. The level of specialization required to receive a degree in a modern scientific field is such that all four years could be spent learning a discipline, and our scientists and engineers would be better for it.

If all four years are not required, then all the extra education, in drama, in geology (that easy freshman class that all students take, affectionately referred to in uncouth circles as, “rocks for jocks”), in speech communication, in film appreciation, and all the other bogus classes needed to receive a “well-rounded” university education simply serve to detain students for four years, when two would do, and increase their student debt.

Now, I’m not arguing that drama or film appreciation are not noble or useful pursuits. Simply put, however, are they necessary for a university education? What modern student doesn’t understand film? Our lives are a multimedia existence. Modern students no more need film than they need classes explaining to them how to use their cell phones, or, to beat a straw horse, how to walk on two feet. In fact, modern students could probably teach academics a thing or two, because, as has become painfully obvious, academics, especially in the humanities, are sadly behind the times.

I was allowed to graduate with two degrees in English without any instruction on how the modern business world uses English and communication. I needed HTML, javascript, layout and design instruction, copy-editing, advertisement classes, and any number of other skills I had to teach myself after I realized I needed them to perform the job I was hired to do. Perhaps I picked the wrong pursuit, but I was young and I sorely needed guidance that was not given.

Now, I have no patience for curmudgeonly whiners who present problems without suggesting solutions, so I mean to present some.

Our education system needs to be based on the realistic needs of modern students, students who need real world skills. Contemplating art, and I say this as a novelist and an artist, has no place in the modern college system when so much is riding on that degree. It’s too expensive to spend time contemplating the moon.

Forcing students to learn things they have no interest in, and saddling them with vast amounts of debt for the privilege, is, frankly, bullshit. It’s an outdated system that needs to be changed. I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that recently I read a book of literary criticism. I read it for fun, but also because I needed it. It was applicable to me. Any success that I’ve had in any area has always been won on self-taught sweat, teaching myself the skills that I needed to know because they weren’t taught to me by my supposed educators.

This must change.

Universities need to come down from their ivory towers and talk to modern, fast-paced businesses. They need to ask companies what they want in an English major, a history major, even a computer science major. They need to teach students the skills employers want. They need to institute mandatory internship programs so students gain experience and see the immediate value of the skills they are being taught in the classroom. Schools need to stop trying to dictate how things should be run, and start examining how things are run.

These are the principles that I’ve learned, as a lifetime learner, an employee, and during my two year stint as a teacher while earning my master’s degree:

1. Immediate need dictates desire to learn. If a student needs to know something for a project or an aspect of her job, she will learn it.
2. The converse of point one is also true. Without an applicable need or interest, students will not learn.
3. Universities need to do a better job of preparing students for the real world by listening, not by trying to dictate the terms. Employers want skills, not theory. Theory comes from experience with the material, not the other way around. Employers want experience. Mandatory internships, arranged by the university, are necessary.

The formal education system in this country needs to be reformed. The above steps need to be taken. Classes need to focus on what students need to perform their jobs and the information they are taught needs to be directly applicable.

Art, culture, and the other aspects that make a life worth living need to be left to personal pursuits. I say this without blanching, even as an art lover, because I know that unless a student wants to learn about those things, instruction in those disciplines is useless. It doesn’t get past the media haze unless students reach out for those things themselves, and no instruction by stodgy old men and women out of touch with the modern world is going to encourage that desire. It can only come from inside, or because students feel it’s needed.

It’s time to reform. Otherwise, I stand by the statement boldly proclaimed as the title of this essay: Formal education is bunk.