Past Diatribes

Not everyone agrees. While it is true that many occupations do require skills or knowledge that only specialized training can provide, a diploma or degree is not always the Ultimate Qualification for success.

The famous British Public Schools provide an example against placing too much faith in specific wording on parchment. Esteemed schools like Harrow and Eton produced the men who brought the British Empire to its height. (Consider, for sake of argument, that conquering or subjucating other countries is a mark of national ability.) What sorts of things did these graduates learn that empowered them? Latin and ancient Greek. Roman history. Etiquete. They spent their time exploring dead languages and a dead world, in a crucial time of technical advances.

If their curriculum was irrelevant, how did these students go on to become world leaders?

The answer is: It taught them how to think. Greek and Latin were believed to foster logical thinking. Methods of memory and analysis were learned in studying history, even if that history had left only ruins as reminder. Their environment built character.

Personally, I am not a big admirer of the sunburnt British Empire, but reading a few biographies reveals that it was forged and then held together by people who set themselves goals and then strove with all their intelligence, resourcefulness, and determination to ultimate effect.

As much as I dislike Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, he serves for a current-day example. He has taken Disney from near-bankrupsy in the 80's to the entertainment superpower it is today. Not bad for an ex-theater major with no business training. This ascendency relies solely on outstanding personal ability, though I still feel anyone who remunerates himself $204,000,000.00 a year by paying the Haitian employees who manufacture his merchandise forty cents an hour is a soulless scumbag, the sort who is likely to go out of his way to hire hitmen or lawyers to go after poor diatribe-writing dissenteers half a world away!