Oversimplifying, you can divide people into the curious, life-of-the-mind sort–never more than 10% of the population–and the incurious, like this author. The incurious belong in trade schools, not universities, both because they shouldn’t have to spend money on an education they don’t want and because they ruin the classes for the curious.

Unfortunately, there’s been a long process of school inflation, by which all the vocational schools and normal schools have renamed themselves universities. (Paul Fussell’s book “Class” has a few very memorable pages on this topic.) The root problem is that prospective employers (and other social forces) create a huge incentive for the incurious to masquerade as the curious, which they do by getting “university” degrees. This causes suffering for the curious and incurious alike–the former because they take classes with a predominance of the incurious, and the latter because, like this author, they waste time and money on classes they don’t want and probably won’t benefit from. (The teachers suffer too, of course.)

In this vein, I thought you might be interested in Michael Slouka’s recent essay in Harper’s, if you have not seen it yet.

I comment here and here.