Advice for High School Grads
I’ve saved a bunch of articles from the beginning of the summer, and now I am making my way through them. The first: Advice for High School Graduates from The Conversation Blog at the New York Times. The blog is like sitting around a dinner table with two knowledgeable, witty, opinionated folks: David Brooks and Gail Collins, both columnists at the Times. In this piece, Brooks requests help from Collins, as he will soon make a commencement speech at a high school. He laments some sizable gaps in the education options available:
The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love. The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.
The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.
These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness. There are guidance offices to help people in the monumental task of selecting a college. There are business schools offering lavish career placement services. There is a vast media apparatus offering minute advice on how to furnish your home or expand your deck.
This isn’t the only great piece from The Conversation Blog — check it out if you’d like some more thoughtful, witty commentary on the “pressing, and not-so-pressing, issues of the day.”
Comments
Dan McKeown
I like that excerpt. I usually do not have much time for blogs that are sponsored by massive new sources (such as the NYT, BBC, CNN, etc.) but this one looks worthwhile. Well done tumbledry!
Nils
I also found that excerpt to be thought provoking. It’s not the first time I’ve come across interesting musings on relationships in TumbleDry, and it’s probably not the last.
Alexander Micek
I’m really glad you guys liked this — I must say it’s positively refreshing to read their thoughts and opinions. Their ideas are well reasoned and well-put. On top of that (and I think particularly well exemplified here by David Brooks), they’ve some really fresh ways of treating topics with which we are all familiar (e.g. school, news items).
The problem with the blogs sponsored by large news sources is that some of the best independent blogs get… purchased by large news sources. It’s all so complicated, it practically requires one to sit down and down and determine provenance for whatever new site you’re looking at.