2002-07-18 - 5:56 p.m.
About 24 hours ago, watching the sun set over the bay with Dani and Maria, Dani responded to something by commenting that we’re college students. Maria had to correct her, because she’s not. I mentioned that I may be a student for the next four years. What’s wrong with that? they asked. It’s that being a student is bad, they said, but that it’s time between now and when I can actually set about acomplishing something.
“How does it sound for a funeral eulegy,‘’He died; he was very well educated.’”
Laughter. Then we started the so-humorous topic of what would be said if various people, specificly pav, died today. And what would be in their wills. Pav: “To the New College Foundation, I leave my student loans, to endow the scholarship… I never received.”
But it was as I told Dani and Maria earlier, at dinner, that the entire concept of New College is suspect, because weouldn’t someone like Pav – or anyone – do better at a program that actually educates you will skills that are desirable by employers, that gives you an education that will actually get you recruited to a job upon your graduation, instead of dropping you off into the world with no marketable skills?
No, instead we have education for its own sake, a wilful disregarding of the fact that we will actually have to function in the real world and that the real world is capatalistic and that our worth as a human being can be quantified, and the life that we live will have direct bearing on what that number amounts to. That’s what we will amount to.
I’m not saying that the poiint of life is money—whoever dies with the most toys wins—but without money you can’t exist. At the Grainery a few days ago, sitting at the tables outside waiting for pav to come out, my mind wandered mispfully and I said to Ben, “Do you ever wonder what it would be like to own the means of production?”
The banter was unsatisfactory, but it was not accidential that this particular thought struck me with these particular people at that particular place, the Grainery. From my experences at Marxist summer camp, I feel that I have a worldview to explain how we came to this place. On the subject of the means of production, I want to share the last article I read in Maryland, “Class Confrontations in Archaeology.” How did we get into college, and/or come to study archaeology?
“[Archaeology is part of the intellectual apparatus (things such as schools, books, magazines, organizations, and the arts) that produces the symbolic capital (things usch as esotaric knowledge, shared experence, certification, and social skills) that individuals need to be part of the middle class. This apparatus, including archaeology, developed as part of the historic struggles that created the capitalist middle class.…
“Middle-class ideology puts a high value on the intellectual apparatus of capitalism, especially educational institutions, both because the class reproduces itself through this apparatus, and because much of the class finds employment in it….
“What has emerged in the United States since the 1980s is a split economy with relatively fewer well-paying jobs than before and relatively more insecure low-paying jobs….
“”Individuals graduating with bachlor’s degrees hit similar walls [of no available posistions] and since the 1980s a university degree has not guaranteed entry into the middle class, although it remains a requirement. Fifty percent of the workforce today enters college, but only about 20% of the jobs available are middle class.”
THE MIDDLE CLASSES
The popular useage of the term middle class in the United States equates this class either with middle income, or with white collar occupations. In contrast to this common usage, we speak of class as a structural phenomenon defined by the relationship
