One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more.
Maybe I don’t have an Ivy League education, but if you prick me, do I not bleed? If you tickle me, do I not laugh? Oh yes, I laugh and laugh:
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.
Well now isn’t that patronizing. Guess what, egghead? He doesn’t want more than a few minutes of small talk out of you. After that he will thank you very politely for getting out of his way so he can do his very practical, very necessary, rather highly skilled and lucrative job. Nobody cares that you feel alienated from your plumber, least of all your plumber.
Filed under: magazines Tagged: | American Scholar, snobbery
Also, it should be mentioned that in Charlottesville, it is a false assumption that your plumber is not highly educated. In high school, I once worked in a construction job and was surrounded by PhDs…
In addition, I once knew a guy who looked like he just walked out of the hills (because he did), and had a thick country accent. You may have routinely encountered him at contra dances and bluegrass venues where he played the fiddle (which he taught himself at age 70). He not only built his own telescope by hand grinding a mirror over a foot wide, but also invented many of the machines commonly use for electrophoresis today. If that weren’t enough, in his garage, using surplus equipment auctioned by UVa, he invented a cheap way to manufacter insulin that would have changed the lives of countless people. That is, if UVa hadn’t demanded control of the patent. To which he replied, “okay, then build it yourself”. Sadly the invention died along with him.
So… the next time you encounter someone with a mountain accent who lives out in the country, remember, they might just know things that can change the world if you only are willing to listen…