I was one of those silly people who thought that getting accepted into an Ivy League was the ultimate ‘roadmap’ to a successful life. I thought I would make money, have healthy competition at work and settle.
It was also a way to realize that I was not completely stupid--a validation from the people I once admired.
The minute I started college I studied like a dog. My time was spent at school, at the library, at my desk at home and on week ends, I went to Barnes and Nobles as a mini ‘break’ to learn more things about my future academic career. It never stopped! I declined party invitations, coffee dates, Halloween parties and many other occasions I had to have fun to concentrate on that goal: getting into an Ivy League….and I did.
The minute I stepped a foot on that campus lawn, I was surrounded by classmates who were driven and extremely successful academically. They read a lot of those ‘intellectual’ books, the one’s you find in the New York Times’ list. The ones you have to read because it’s so much better to agree with everyone around you because you all read the same things. Thanks Steve Wozniak for illustrating that idea in such a simple and powerful way!
They were all liberals, read all the same, newspapers, magazines and watched the same documentaries and obviously agreed on the same things—at least most of them. Anytime I tempted to word a different opinion—even on trivial subjects, I was looked at as a madwoman. One memorable example was asking a student if he was watching RT TV, which I thought was a terrific and objective news channel. He looked at me as if I was a communist spy and quickly left. I was befuddled.
I learned later that those reactions had a name: cognitive dissonance. I knew a lot of people were brainwashed about all sorts of things, including education—ironically—health, politics and so on. But I was naïve and hopeful enough to still believe that students and professors at a journalism school of that notoriety would be a little more open minded and may I say smarter. God, was I wrong.
It seems like there is a correlation between how student perform and how stupid they are. The A+ students are very well trained robots and the C or D students—or even better, the ones who drop out of school—are the smartest, the freest and most open minded. There are always exceptions, obviously!
The teachers were worse. They had sadistic tendencies, belittled us, using their impressive resumes as a way to construct an unhealthy and superficial worship-like vibe around them.
The way students looked at their teachers with such awe, respect and admiration was sickening, even frightening.
One got into working for the New York Times by a crazy stroke of luck but there was no way he deserved to be here. The other one was about to retire and should have left a while ago. It’s a lot of tuition money to get teachers who don’t care about their students and who treat them like dogs.
Being called stupid, and having moronic teachers wasn’t the worst part. Getting a job after graduating seemed to me so obvious. It wasn’t….
Now I’m broke, jobless and my confidence has dropped drastically but at least I’m slowly accepting the huge mistake I’ve made, all those lost hours I could have spent enjoying my life. Now I know how useless the current school system is, how it kills our spirit, our joy to learn, our joy to live and how I wish I had been a high school dropout.