Knowledge: The Educated Fellow vs. The Working Fella

My whole life I have heard it said that in order to obtain a decent paying job, I need to graduate from high school, get into a good college, and achieve some sort of post-secondary degree. I probably speak for a large majority of my peers when bringing up such a clichéd statement. But I’m also sure that at least a few of us have questioned the purpose and reason to why a higher education is so important.

The standard way of thinking about knowledge in general, is that it is based on IQ scores, academic grades, and the type of education received. The scholar, Mike Rose, makes point on this in his 2009 article, Blue-Collar Brilliance, which argues against the fallacy in that blue-collar occupations require little to no knowledge (discussed later). So is a post-secondary education meant to further this ideology of intellectual knowledge? Perhaps in a few instances, but as the late novelist, David Foster Wallace said in his 2005 Kenyon Commencement Speech: “a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about ‘teaching you how to think.’”

Wallace’s notion, in other words, suggests what he believes to be the true value of a post-secondary, liberal arts education. That it consciously guides us in choosing how and what to perceive in certain situations, in turn allowing us a choice in how we interpret such experiences in day-to-day, adult life. The alternative to this conscious state of mind is the unconscious or “default” settings of human psychology, in where our narcissistic and arrogant emotions control how we view things. Wallace states that although these feelings are natural, expressing them day-in and day-out as reaction to the trenches of daily adult life can make us “slaves” to...

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...Rose’s article, he states: “To acknowledge a broader range of intellectual capacity is to take seriously the concept of cognitive variability.”

When comparing Wallace’s speech regarding the conscious value of a liberal arts education with Rose’s article on the knowledge obtained through blue-collar work, it’s obvious that both are represented quite differently. Nevertheless, Wallace’s explanation of a liberal arts education, in that it is more about simple awareness, directly contests against the belief that higher education determines intelligence. This same belief was repudiated in Rose’s article. Both authors focus on the topic of knowledge acquired through a specific course of time, and both describe its ideology in a similar fashion. While a formal educational experience differs from its informal counterpart, both have the potential to emit great knowledge.