Work, Leisure and Full Engagement

I just finished this blog 5 minutes ago, but it deleted it so this will be a little condensed.

I found that his section on community got me really excited, but let me down when it didn't really go in as much depth as I would have liked. I found his story of the mortgage broker to sound as if it would be very unfulfilling and it would be a never ending circle of feeling trapped in the cycle. The months spent working to earn money would become very frustrating knowing the freedom you would like to have. The other extreme is that your work is your leisure, but the problem with this is that your leisure becomes cheapened because of money. I feel like there has got to be some way out of these unfulfilling lifestyles, but being young and without much work experience I don't really have much of an answer and haven't been able to find one in Crawford's book, hopefully I'll figure it out soon to find out what to do with my life.

I am a disembodied brain in a jar.

After reading this chapter in Crawford, I can't help but relate to the feeling that I am being treated like a man in a box cut off from the outside world getting instructions and being expected to follow along and spit out some paper. I'm merely regurgitating much of what I've been "taught", but I don't really know how much of it I have taken in or have understood. It seems as though the education seems to work both ways where professors are treated with the same sort of robotic functions. I wonder what sort of learning environment would be created if students and teachers could learn how to interact with each other as if they were normal human beings and not just another face of a careless institution looking for our money.

I would have appreciated if Crawford hit more on how relationships affect learning and doing, because it seems to me that there is something more than individuals being treated like machines. I would like to hear some suggestions with sound reasoning for a different way for things to be done rather than just more concerns about the current way of society.

Cubicle Contradiction

This book continues to be like the scratching of fingernails against a chalkboard, the dissonance hard to take. There is this continuing contradiction that the academic author is telling us to not get so caught up in academics. The abstractive thought is creating contradictions in many people's lives that can continue because the contradictory thought justifying their actions is in disjuncture with reality.

Crawford's analysis of college degrees is very interesting as we have already discussed similar issues in class where we feel like we're just getting a piece of paper that doesn't really mean anything besides status. I get the general feeling that society pushes towards having degrees in a manner that is disenfranchising the poor and minority groups. The white privileged people have more access to a college degree to secure their spot in society while minorities have a much more difficult time because of the on going cycle of poverty. Degrees are a large part of what decides class in the United States, a way of disguising or abstracting the racism that exists within the system.