This week I tried to tackle the idea of how poetry is invented, learned, and mastered. After learning about a variety of poets and their different prose from my poetry class, I found a common ground between a lot of these individuals; they were mostly college or high school drop outs. I found it fascinating how even a man who has as much intellect as Robert Frost or Robert Browning did not complete college. After looking at this idea from a bunch of angles, I realized one key idea: college isn't for everyone. With the large increase of college tuition, to some people, a high school degree is the only affordable degree. Regardless of whether a person can or can not afford the tuition though does not measure his or her intellect by any means.
In my poetry class, we were studying Ogden Nash. In this man's lifetime, he managed to work on Wall Street, have poems in Harper's, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Vogue, and was a schoolteacher. There was no question that Nash was a truly gifted individual who inspired millions of people with his popular collections of poems. He mastered all of these prominent rolls WITHOUT a college degree. That's right. Granted he went to Harvard for a year, but he dropped out after a year for a variety of reasons; regardless, he is still considered one of the most notable poets of the twentieth century.
Another example of a poet who did not need professors or peer writing labs to become a successful writer is Dorothy Parker. Obviously, growing up as a young woman during the twentieth century suffrage movement was definitely challenging. Not only was a woman's role in society viewed inferior to a man's, but also education for a woman was hard to come by, especially a college degree. Because of this rarity, Parker stopped her formal education at the age of 14. Nonetheless, she still managed to write scores of poems, novels, autobiographies, and plays. She is, in my humble opinion, the best female poet in the twentieth century.
What I am basically trying to get across is this question. Is college really for everyone? There are tons of people who go to my school who are absolute geniuses. For some, it is Math, Literature, Science, or History. Whatever a person's forte is, if he or she utilized his or her talents in these fields, then success is inevitable. However, there are millions, even billions of people who use college as a place to find his or her intellectual passion. Once this passion is found, what is really the point of college? Being lectured by professors, and eating high calorie food? In today's society, becoming successful involves being able to have time management and discipline to learn by oneself. By no means can something as insignificant as a piece of paper make one person smarter than another.
-Permitpat
PAT! This is one of the biggest problems facing America today. So many people are getting useless degrees that make the whole higher education system is becoming devalued. Think of it like "Educational Inflation."
ReplyDeleteEspecially because many people get a degree in something that does not interest them, just because they think they "need" a degree to be successful.
Both of my older siblings didn't finish collage and my sister didn't even start college. Today they are both very successful. My brother Nick co-owns a coffee farm in Nicaragua, and works in an redwood conservation business. My sister Alexandra is a musician in Brooklyn. Now she is touring all over the US. She just was in cali doing some shows, now she is getting payed to fly to Miami for a big artist project.