Laura Penny - More Money Than Brains: Why School Sucks, College Is Crap, & Idiots Think Theyre Right

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For my family and my fellow nerds

A portrait of the author as a young Poindexter.

W hen I was a bespectacled baby nerd, pudgy, precocious prey for bullies, my parents consoled me with a beautiful lie. Someday, in magical places called college and work, being smart would be cool. Id have the last laugh while the bullies were slaving away at crummy jobs. My mom and dad said youth was their time to shine, the high point for the popular, truculent lunkheads who mocked spelling bees and science fairs. Their lives would be all downhill after grade 12. Then nerds like me would become doctors and lawyers and maybe even prime minister, and profit from the dimwittedness of our former tormentors. Let em have their stupid dances and hockey games, they said. The future belonged to the weird kids who dug microscopes and dictionaries.

This, like many of my parents reassuring fibs, was partly true. There was no Santa, but there were plenty of Santas in the malls every December. The power of nerdiness did indeed propel many of my fellow Poindexters into respectable professions. The Poindexters the pallid, indoorsy, owlish sorts who always got picked last for teams have become coders and chemists and brokers and communications experts. But the struggle between bullies and nerds certainly did not end, as promised, when we graduated. Nor do nerds always emerge victorious in the contests of adult life. The bullies persevered and proliferated, went online and on TV and the radio, into politics and industry, and found new venues for numerous variations on a familiar theme: Fuck you, four-eyes.

I am not surprised that bullies continue to hate nerds, that the dudes who shove weedy science fair winners into lockers grow up to reject carbon taxes and vote for strong leaders. No, what shocks me is the number of self-hating nerds who are willing to pander to the bullies, the countless pundits and politicos who deploy their A-student skills in the service of anti-intellectualism.

This anti-intellectualism is at odds with all our talk about the importance of good schools. North Americans lavish a lot of rhetoric and resources on education. Politicians, pundits, business leaders, and concerned citizens natter on about the need to train workers to stay competitive in a global information economy, where knowledge is power. Post-secondary enrolment has reached record highs and private colleges of varying legitness have sprung up all over North America to cater to our seemingly insatiable hunger for classes. We also spend millions on books, toys, DVD s, video games, and supplements that claim to boost young or aging brains.

Never have so many been so schooled! But all this extra education has not turned the majority of North Americans into nerds, or nerdophiles. Our well-intentioned attempts to push and prod every semi-sentient kid through university seem to be backfiring. More people spending money and time on degrees has produced a surprising toxic side effect: more people who hate school and nerds.

The bachelors degree has become a costly high-school diploma, the new middle-class normal. Ergo, higher ed has been demoted to the level of a racket, a swindle, a series of pointless exertions one must complete to get the golden ticket to a good job. Listen to talk radio, watch Fox News, and youll learn that nerds are the real bullies. We dastardly bastards run the continents most widespread and shameless kid-snatching operation, spiriting peoples beloved offspring away for years so we can make them think (and drink) strange things for our own amusement and enrichment. The con has gone so well that weve started hustling suckers of all ages, luring hardworking adults and innocent seniors into our cunning scholastic traps. We extort money, effort, and time from taxpayers, students, and their families by threatening them with the dread spectre of unemployability. Then we teach material our students will never, ever use at work or anywhere else, for that matter. What do we know-it-alls know about work? Its not like any of us has ever been there or done any.

Some of the people who spin this spiel are dropouts, such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who matriculated in morning-zoo shows and Top 40 Countdown radio. Beck and Limbaugh present their lack of academic credentials as proof of their moral and intellectual purity. At the same time, they ape the academics they claim to abhor: Limbaugh refers to himself as a professor from the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, and Beck scribbles Byzantine charts on a chalkboard as if hes lecturing undergrads.

Then there are all their fellow-travellers, folks like Ann Coulter and Mark Levin, who have perfectly respectable degrees from elite schools the very academic institutions they incessantly deride. Politicians such as Dubya and Mitt Romney pull the same act. Pay no attention to my fancy degree or Harvard M.B.A. or the family fortunes that funded my first-class credentials. Im a commonsensical commoner, a straight-talkin shitkicker just like you.

This exceedingly cynical summary of education that it is a swindle perpetrated by sophists is not that much of an exaggeration, alas. Ive seen this view of education, phrased in much more vulgar terms, on many a message board. Ive encountered more genteel versions of it in political speeches, editorials, and letters to the editor. This dismissive attitude is also evident in other popular phrases. Overeducated is now common parlance. Yet you never hear that someone is over-rich or oversexy. Perpetual student is rarely a ringing endorsement of someones commitment to lifelong learning, to bum a bit of educratic euphemese. When we come across terms such as academic or theoretical in the media, they usually mean irrelevant or imaginary, mere mental exercises at a remove from the serious business of life. You think youre so smart is never a compliment; the only thing worse than being smart is thinking that you are.

This attitude affects the way students approach university. Many want to get credentials that guarantee them super-awesome careers, but they dont need no edjumacation. Ive taught useless liberal-artsy subjects such as English and philosophy for a decade, and some of my students have been quite frank. No offence, Miss, but reading, thinking, and writing are wastes of time and boring as hell. They were never gonna use English even though they had to do precisely that to bitch about its uselessness.

I love teaching, but there are days when I feel like a goddamn cartwright, like a practitioner and proponent of archaic and eccentric arts the kids will not need in the glorious analphabetic future. Sonnets, semicolons, and history might as well be alchemy or phrenology. As long as, like, people can, like, understand you, like, whats the diff, yknow? Nobody cares about that old stuff. Nobody understands those long words. Nobody ever got hired because they could parse rhyme schemes or pick an argument apart or write a sentence, except for nerds like me, who squander our lives totally overanalyzing every little thing.

It would be a gross generalization to simply say that North Americans are ignorant and anti-intellectual. That would also make a really short book; I could print it in a hundred-point font, illustrate it with pictures of boobs and monster trucks, and then wait to see if it proved itself with boffo sales. It is more accurate to say that North Americans have a love-hate relationship with knowledge. We overestimate the value and reliability of certain uses of intelligence and can be quite disdainful towards mental pursuits that do not result in new stocks, synthetic foodstuffs, pills, or modes of conveyance. If were going to endure the insufferable tedium of learning, we do so for one reason: to make the big bucks.