Euro

Edo period (1603–1867) / Hiroshige/ Hodogaya, Shinkame Bashi, Station 5

A bad day yesterday turned into a good day.  The nurses are back with all of their boojie demands and overwrought self-images which presents to me a very-very much a mixed bag.  I love my girls, but I have forgotten just how self-absorbed the profession of nursing is.

Then I went over to the Double Dragon and tossed back a few with AA and her beau Pommy-Boy (AKA: George).  Hung around a bar for four hours and did some dang fine stream-of-consciousness bullshitting about anything from fuckwad the first, to the structure and idiosyncrasies of spike sequences on the Rona, to the Florentine Camerata.  It truly was the reason that bars were invented in the first place.  Finest Kind.

But the Pommy boy got me a-thinking.  Not about any one of the topics in particular, but in the differences between Europeans and Americans.  Now, I know that the Eurpeans aren’t any “smarter” than Americans, but it is how they are educated that allows the differences between the two cultures to diverge.   Europeans actually have an educational system.  The US has trade schools.  The relentless narrowing of expertise and focus comes at the expense of intellectual and cultural breadth needed for what I consider to be a balanced human being.

Now, this doesn’t mean that European education doesn’t produce some narrow-minded automata posing as human beings, but from my experience, this is a minority result in those toting around an education from the “varsity” in European Schools, best guess is around 25% of the total population of the “edumacated”.  

The educational system here in the “land o’ the free” is weighted diametrically opposite.  Our system tends to produce the narrow-focus needed of well-paid servants.  The general education requirements and the departments required to teach the ambiguity of the liberal arts are reduced to a smattering of “general education” requirements that are grudgingly disposed of and promptly forgotten by drunken freshmen.

I suppose that I could generate a graph where these two differing continental trends of intellectual development are displayed visually to make a complex interaction more easily accessible.  But in a sense, that would just make me an American, wouldn’t it?