Exactly.

I’ve been following a Wheaton professor’s tumblr the last few months and am constantly subjected to a steady flow of incredibly smart quotes.  For everyone who’s ever wracked their brains over IB or any sort of schooling, this is for you.  (And especially for you, Regent students.)

Will Wilkinson:

I’ve got a good bit of student-loan debt myself, acquired studying philosophy in grad school. And then I dropped out before finishing my Ph.D.! Well, I don’t regret it. Sometimes in grad school you’ll hear students and faculty both speak with a certain dread of “the real world.” It turns out, however, that universities aren’t actually located outside this here space-time continuum, but are part of the real world, and a pretty great part, too, if you’re lucky enough to get into it. I don’t know that when I took out student loans to help support myself that I thought I was taking some kind of “gamble.” I knew I was redistributing income from my future to my present self, and not really because I needed the money to make an investment that would payoff, but because I wanted to study philosophy and I couldn’t otherwise afford it. I was buying the rarefied leisure of grad school and knowledge of philosophy. Now I know all about philosophy, will for the rest of my live, and I love it! Did I get some remunerative skills in the bargain? I reckon I did. I certainly sharpened my analytical and argumentative abilities, which came in handy as a think-tank fellow, and come in handy now as a semi-employed blogger for The Economist and Big Think. But so what! I spent years reading and thinking about Aristotle and Kant and Quine and Rawls, which is not everyone’s idea of a holiday, but I’ll always treasure that time in my life, and I’ve got more to show for it than a scrapbook of exotic snapshots. It remade my mind.

Pertinent.

(via ayjay)

Notes

  1. followthewus reblogged this from ayjay and added:
    Pertinent. I dedicate this to the brave students in Christian Thought and Culture class :)
  2. richwu reblogged this from ayjay and added:
    I’ve been following a Wheaton professor’s tumblr the last few months and am constantly subjected to a steady flow of...
  3. cryptograhams reblogged this from ayjay
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