Loud

I wasn’t going to comment on it but Tom’s post kind of got me started.

The Belle/Brooke story touches on several issues, most of which are, of course, either completely misrepresented or idiotically covered by the media but deserve a thought or two.

None of them address the issue with the blog/book itself, namely that it still reads like fiction. The outing of Brooke should give the story that added veritas but it just gives you the feeling that she was using it as a form of self-justification/cheap psychotherapy because it dovetails too nicely with the romanticised hooker with a heart of gold stereotype that dominates media.

Tom points out another issue that is missing from the media’s discussion of the Belle/Brooke fandango and that is the fact that she needed to find some way to fund her education. As he said:

But if you want to pursue that further, if you want a doctorate, even in the sciences (where a model of funded research is far more established than in the arts), then maybe the question we should be asking is not whether what Dr. Magnanti did was morally right, but why she had to do it at all.

It also show that even in these ‘enlightened’ times the Dr. Brooke Magnanti story shows us that no matter how educated, intelligent, eloquent, witty or distinguished a woman is, she’s still worth more as a casual fuck for businessmen¹ than as a productive member of society or a contributor to scientific progress.

What’s also missing from the discussions is just how bloody messed up most western education systems are. It’s not just the expense but the incentives and structure of the very thing itself. The only benefit of a lot of university degrees is that it keeps kids off the streets for three years. They tend to learn more about the craft of their chosen profession in the first six months at the job. That’s assuming they get a job in their chosen profession, which is far from a certainty given the UK’s growing emphasis on deskilled service industry jobs. The education industry in the UK has greater economic value as job creation for the administrators, teachers and service people than it does in terms of enabling productivity, training or innovation.

Most of the pressure on people in the UK to go to university doesn’t come from increasing levels of education or easier access to education (which are in all probability going down, people are learning less, more slowly) but from degree inflation: industries which before only required a diploma (as a lot of the required skills can only be learned on the job) now have been turned into degrees with an additional year of ‘padding’ and no real added teaching, learning or training.

Overall, beyond a few select degrees, UK education costs more, is worth less and takes longer than it did a few decades ago.

This is a massive betrayal of the entire idea of social mobility, the working class and lower middle class are facing greater and greater financial pressures to ‘educate’ but the system has been devalued to such an extent that they are getting very little for their added time and investment.

This is not unique to the UK, Iceland has followed almost exactly the same playbook with largely the same results.

I’ve gone as far through the education gauntlet as can be reasonably expected and, even with my PhD, I still doubt the value of the entire process. I’m convinced that if I hadn’t done my PhD or Masters I’d still be roughly where I am in terms of intellectual development and I’d be more experienced at my job.

I also wouldn’t have wasted as much time on the ridiculous nonsense that is most of what passes as critical analysis in the humanities and narrative theory.

I finished junior college when I was twenty (with a heavy emphasis on science, physics and math) and that was the end of my schooling. The rest is largely autodidactic. I have about as much time now to study and read and broaden my mind as I did when I was in academia.

As an industry, the academia that I witnessed was more obsessed with bureaucracy, infighting and dogma than honest intellectual development and scholastic curiosity. Most of the time sincere curiosity seemed to be more of a handicap than an asset.

If the value of university education isn’t self-evident to somebody with a PhD and several years worth of teaching experience, then the industry has more than just a PR or finance problem.