Back in the ’90, I applied for a job with a company that intended to bring young students from Asia and Africa to the States for the “cultural” experience. During a far-ranging interview, they went over my educational achievements. Bachelors, cum laude with honors in anthropology, a masters in anthropology, and most of a Doctorate at an Ivy League school. Oh, one other thing. I was a high school dropout without a General Equivalence Diploma.
The last ended the interview. They stated they could not hire someone who did not graduate from high school. I was, and remain, incredulous that this mattered, considering my other academic achievements. Regretfully, I’ve since learned that this phenomenon is not entirely uncommon.
It’s like, despite transcripts, recommendations, and my extensive career history, I’d lie about something, which, at this remove, is ridiculous. OK, I am Lou Carreras. I am not now and never have been a high school graduate.
Get a life, people. Not every path through life filters through four years of high school in the United States or elsewhere. Some of us take different paths and maybe even cut a corner or two. I learned things on the road, in Greenwich Village, and in oddball places with no name that’d make your idiot high school graduate yelp and cry out for momma.
While working as an applied anthropologist in Massachusetts, a large number of my informants were people whose education was cut short by the Great Depression. Most of them, like my father, had about a ninth-grade education. It didn’t stop them from enjoying literature, poetry, a musical, or mastering what they needed for a successful life. Some of them even thought I was some kind of big shot until it came out that I was just another alternate learner like them.
Try that term on for size – alternate learner. One size does not fit all, and being a veteran of life may fill out the holes left by your precious four year curriculum in social indoctrination.
Get a life.
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I liked the post, and the way you are thinking.
Ah…My Uncle Hank had to drop out of jr high to help support the family by working on oil rigs in Oklahoma with his dad. Then came WW II and the Navy, South Pacific on an island supplying Guadalcanal. Then he got married and started a family. He was a master mechanic and raised two sons, one of whom went to the University of Chicago. He admired his wife because she had a high school diploma. He and she were so proud of my masters degree that they drove to Denver from Billings to watch me get my diploma. From the back of the arena they yelled, “Yeee-HA!” in the best Montana fashion. He spent all his life educating himself. One of the last things he said to me was he wished he’d had an education like my Aunt Jo and that he was so proud of me.
One day in the library at SDSU I looked at the section of PhD Dissertations. There were very few until suddenly, in the 90s, there started to be more and then more and then more and I thought about how higher education had evolved into a business over that interval. At that point I decided not to be cynical and help my students find the OED. I don’t have a PhD. I headed in that direction briefly then looked around at my colleagues with PhDs who were also teaching part time. A PhD in something useful might have meaning, but I spent my 38 years teaching what I learned in Advanced Placement English in high school.
Your observations on the Phud becoming a business are right on. One of my more down to earth advisors pointed out to me that the father of modern anthropology (Kroeber) had a thesis that was only ninety pages long ( including footnotes, tables and bibliography). Most now run to a thousand pages.
I went to grad school because I had a thesis I wanted to write. Grad school was not my milieu though I had the greatest adviser on the planet and all was well. For a PhD? What kind of stupid thing would I write and what onanistic enervated dillentantish (not in the good meaning of the word which means to delight) seminars would I have had to endure on the criticism of the criticism of the criticism of this critic? No. no no no. I walked out of the GRE 3/4 of the way through thinking, “I like what I’m doing.” And I did.
Wow. C’mon, Martha! Tell us how you really feel about it!
In retrospect, thinking about it after a satisfying career with only a master’s, I agree with you.
I would tell you how I really feel but Oh wait. I did. 😀 “Only” a masters? No no no… Not “only” at all.
Good story and you obviously made a good choice by using the alternate learning method