The frightening rise of the aggressive, combative, uninformed and unintelligible
Most people hate awards, until they win one.And so it is with a university degree — those who have one just have one. And those who don’t are often dismissive about those who do, and only because they don’t have one.It’s all a lot of nonsense really. I’ve always held close something a Rhodes journalism professor told a lecture hall full of quivering first years: having a degree does not make you educated. It merely opens you up to the possibility of the astonishing treasures there are to discover through the world of learning.Also read: How the cack-handed and charmless Maite Nkoana-Mashabane has hurt SAAll a university education does, he said, is teach you how to access information, how to analyse and interpret it, and how to distil that information into what is important and what not.Of course a tertiary education is not necessary for that — some of the people I love the most are not university educated. Still, they have the smarts of being self-taught mainly through being well-re...
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