My father has five (no joke) MA's and a PhD, and yet was a complete failure as a provider. I grew up hungry, for food, as well as all of the social and cultural trappings of the middle class neighborhoods whose schools I was bussed into in the 1970's and 80's. I remember going hungry, or being ashamed of the cheap clothes my mother could afford to give me, or the beat up car she drove. Yet nothing enfuriates me more than to note these things in conversation with my peers/professors and to be told that because I was raised in a household of intellectuals, my own experience with poverty was somehow not as debilitating because I had the benefit of "cultural capital", which somehow should have made me less hungry or ashamed to be poor, or alleviated the ruined self image I have carried through a life of dead end, unsatisfying jobs.

Having educated parents only gave my siblings and I the vocabulary to voice our cynical disgust with our lot, a poison that continues to affect my outlook on life though I married into an upper middle class, professional family. Their sensation seems to be (as with most of my peers who have had comfortable upbringings) that I should be able to shake it off, yet I am still prone to the same shame and hostility in my unspoken reactions in many social situations. I will always be the "poor kid" thanks to the basic flavor of my early learning experiences.

It seems that regardless of the hyped expectations of the fruits of higher education, a graduate degree is hardly any barrier between cold reality and keeping one's children from becoming jaded at an early age. Being poor, but aware, only made accepting the truth more difficult for me.

as it becomes more and more obvious that those who seem to have absorbed his message the most, use it to such hideous ends. I wonder when the McCain Campaign will get desperate enough to send out fliers of Obama dressed as a Muslim with a Palestinian flag in the background, ala a reverse of Barthes' Algerian soldier. Oh crap! I just outed myself as a member of the crypto-commie, educated elite! Don't tell anyone...

Wow... I guess that's what elderly skinheads look like. Get ready to be lined up against the wall fellow pinkos.

This is the most smoothly eloquent piece of writing I've read since... Well, since the last time I read anything by Joan Didion. That I can be drawn so effortlessly into this analysis at a point where I am so exhausted by the nonstop mental clutter and flagellation of the last twenty months of political discourse is a wonderful reminder that truly great writing is not just communication or volume, but craft. My compliments to the chef.

It's been my experience, in doing so, that the issue is commonly enough that a student in the lower percentile has inadequate preparation coming from the public institution that spat them forth. I gather that things like learning to enjoy reading, strong study skills/work ethic are pretty much the last thing many of the students I have tutored understand as a priority... In that sense I have to agree that many students aren't ready for college, straight from high school.

I wasn't. Yet I am now full-time at UCB, getting myself ready to apply to PhD programs in Cultural Studies -something I wasn't aware of, or could have cared less about, when I graduated high school with a below average GPA in 1987.

Maybe it's ok, then, that not everyone goes to, or is told that they belong in college. Maybe they should be told how important it is that someone knows how to repair cars, or be a policeman, or a carpenter. Maybe it's just a temporal thing, as it was for me. Because one isn't ready now hardly means they will not be later.

One of the biggest issues I have with my younger peers at Cal is that many of them haven't got the life experience to make truly informed decisions about their futures because they have no experience in the harsh realities of the real world. Eavesdropping once on a conversation some of my classmates were having revealed this: "I don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate. Maybe I'll be, like, the super educated, philosopher waitress. I'll probably work at a store somewhere."

I'd love if some smart guy writer/cultural commentator could investigate the general suspicion I think most of us have in that it's not actually faith that is poisoning our society, but the institutions people build around the ideas of faith. They could start with all of the obvious contradictions involved in being a Christian, like how the Old Testament tells us we can do all of these horrible things to people, yet Jesus is a rather different affair in the New. Yet people still manage to inappropriately conflate the messages of the two to suit their own clannish bigotries. They could move from there to the Shia apostasy, to the caste system in India, and on, and on...

Sounds like an organizational issue to me, and if, as a society, we're going to condemn anything, it should be the super structure that tells you how to channel your harmless, personal feelings about a "higher" power into an intolerance towards other people who are actually corporeal and have the same human qualities you do. Then again, we're only human. We can't be expected to, like, transcend our worse impulses, can we?