the going away to university has many benefits when it comes to broadening of the young person's mind, and helpful in impressing cultural relativity at a formative age, but there is a downside too...
preindustrial age, these young men and women were shaping their skills needed in the communities, learned from their elders.
now, once a young person has gone somewhere too far to stay intimately connected to his blood roots and community of origin, during those years of early adulthood, there is a rupture between the needs of the actual (not virtual) natal community, and the new needs that university trains to satisfy.
when it's successful, a young, intelligent man might learn something complicated like law or medecine, and learn to supply needs, useful perhaps in his natal community, but also fungible, less locked into the locus.
when it's less successful, you get overeducated-for-the-situation doctors, selling matches on the street, as i heard happened in the transition between the old soviet russia and the shiny new one.
or scads of very numerate people who could work for a hedge fund, but maybe could not be very useful in practical things like fixing broken axes or axles.
while away, much of the social tissue that holds communities close erodes, and the students return to a world they no longer feel at home in, no matter how good their marks were.
it's fine to change directions. i have a buddy who trained in jurisprudence, and now runs a restaurant. he studied the former mainly to please his parents anyway!
and i know a slew of great musicians who could probably pull down some serious cheese if they were ambitious enough to go seek their fortunes in some bigger burg, but they like the provincial rhythms, the closeness to their families, and they know what they'd lose if they didn't stay home and nurturing the bonds with their communities, keeping that social tissue alive.
no easy answers here... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
were you in part writing that in response to the following passage?
... this decline is also due to a rise in the level of knowledge -- a disturbing statement for those who believe that education automatically improves democracy. That was true yesterday. But times change. The increasing number of graduates with higher levels of education, notes Emmanuel Todd, has reshuffled the deck by creating a category of individuals impervious "to the strong affiliations that used to structure the nation, the public, the social domain".
personally, i feel very ambivalent about this point. on the one hand, i agree that there is an increasing and troubling "atomisation" of our society, due in part no doubt to the decline of these "affiliations". but unlike Todd, i am all for an "organic" falling away of older affiliations so that "new improved" ones can take their place. in this intermediary stage there may be this sense of atomisation, but -- I believe and hope -- the atoms can be reconstituted into an improved (can I say, "higher order") system of social organization. this has been happening for hundreds of years already. the European Union, assuming it succeeds, will be the most recent progression. and part of that process is outgrowing older, more tribal and provincial affiliations like religion, ethnicity, country, etc. and gradually taking on broader, more global affiliations as primary. And getting back to education: I think it's in the universities that we get in touch with these broader affiliations, not only intellectually through our courses and studies, but experientially by meeting people from all over the world, and not just one's home community. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
In fact if you leave out some sort of regional belonging, there is precious little room IMHO for democracy, no room for self-determination and certainly no room for community in any meaningful shape. You start from claiming your democratic stake in the affairs of you neighborhood and move to grander things from there, I think. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake
that's a real good and tough point: does society/community depend first of all on geography?
i am not sure.
what i was trying to convey -- and the issues are definitely intertwined -- was very well expressed by Todd in an interview afew translated:
Emmanuel Todd : The protectionist revolution, current affairs debates : Le Point - Elisabeth Lévy (translated by afew)
... implemented at a collective supranational level, free from any ethnic or State founding myth, would demonstrate that have moved up to a higher state of human consciousness and of historical development.
i don't know if i buy (or even understand) the concept of "cooperative protectionism" he was describing in this passage, but replace that with "society/community in general", and it describes very well what i was trying to get at. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
