An Education by Fits and Starts
But not by degrees.
Some time back I came off of a discussion where a woman was lamenting her lack of education, using it as an excuse for not knowing how or what to write.
Before we ever saw a thing she had written she gave her writing ten demerits for not coming from a person with the necessary legitimate paperwork giving her the authority to write the things she thought she might pass off as, I don’t know…writing?
She thought a sheepskin would give her gravitas and she doesn’t have one so it must be she’s, I don’t know…a dilettante?
A college degree is a wonderful thing — if that’s what you want and if that’s what you’re able to carry off. But if you don’t or if you can’t, here’s a thought: You can still be a writer.
So let’s talk about whether or not a college degree will make you a better writer. I’ll lead, but you should know I don’t have one. I don’t have a degree in anything.
I never got past a few community college credits. I’m not bragging and I’m not complaining. That’s just how it is. (I do feel sad about it, though. And I’ll be contradicting myself in a few minutes.) I bring this up because I think there are too many good writers who hold themselves back when they don’t have to and I want them to stop using a lack of a degree as a barrier.
If you can read you can write. If you can write you can be a writer. All it takes is time, talent, will, and a lot of hard work. Nowhere is it written that you have to have a degree.
There was a time when I devoured “Poets & Writers” and longed for the chance to get an MFA in writing at one of those schools where I could do most of it at home and only had to appear once in a while to show I existed and I was learning something. If only I could pull it off…
It was never going to happen and it’s not going to happen now, but somewhere along the way I gained enough confidence to actually think I could call myself a writer.
I did it by getting stuff published.
My formal “college” consists of 26 community college credits, half of them in ceramics. I took two classes in cultural anthropology, fell in love with Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, and decided anthropology was my life’s calling—until I remembered that we were among the almost-poor and I still had kids at home. So scratch that.
I took two creative writing classes taught by an old pot-smoking hippie who wore chains and earrings and orange tennis shoes and who told us right off that he didn’t care what we wrote as long as we wrote something. I thought the guy himself was ridiculous, trying to be George Carlin and Jack Kerouac, all in the same skin, so it took me a while to realize how much I had actually learned there.
It came to me much later, when I was putting together materials to teach my own adult-ed creative writing classes, that what he gave us was a setting where we could write and fail and get a huge kick out of what we were doing. He was a teacher without judgement but with a knack for finding what could be fixed.
(It’s what I’m looking to do here, come to think of it.)
I took a modern literature class taught by a woman I don’t remember at all–not her name, not her face, not her teaching technique. But through her I met Eudora Welty, Joseph Conrad, Langston Hughes, and Flannery O’Connor; writers I might have overlooked if she hadn’t brought them (and so many others) to my attention.
And that was the end of my formal education. Whatever else I’ve learned since then, I’ve learned either by happenstance or serendipity.
Living near Detroit I had access to some exceptional writers and thinkers and I latched onto them like a parasite on a host. I tried to drain them of everything they had to give–-quietly, of course, without drawing blood. I went to readings and workshops and lectures. I joined groups where professional writers gathered. I wrote and wrote and wrote and eventually shared what I wrote. Some of it came out okay, and some of it even appeared in print. People actually paid me for it. I got to put “writer” on my 1040s.
But here’s the caveat: What I learned was a trade, but it’s a haphazard way to get an education. It’s not an education, in fact. Whatever it is, it’s full of holes. Great gaping holes. Great gaping embarrassing holes. (I couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map if you gave me a hundred bucks to do it. I don’t know what Pi is and I’m afraid I’m missing something meaningful. I only recently found out that Goethe is pronounced “Gurt-uh”. Can’t tell you how thankful I am his name never came up in conversation.)
And here comes the part where I contradict myself — because, yes, I’m a writer without a degree, but I’m alarmed by the deliberate dumbing down of our young people. We make it too hard for them to get the educations they need.
While he was in office, President Obama pushed for free two-year Community College for everyone. Joe Biden is hinting at it again. So far it hasn’t happened but I truly hope it will. It’ll be an uphill battle, but it could be a game-changer. I don’t want anyone else to have to take on the task of educating themselves. It really can’t be done without those gaping holes.
Young people coming up need teachers. They need campus life. They need to argue and debate, to be challenged, to be opened up to directions they might never have taken and ideas they might never have formed on their own. They need to be pushed and pulled and exposed to a world wholly outside of themselves.
They need to prepare for jobs, if not as writers, then in some other field that satisfies and brings them joy. And we as a country need to pave the way. We need to build again, creating good-paying jobs for them to fill. We need to smarten up, and the best way to do it is through education.
We know that now.
Pretty sure we do.
But I could be wrong. I don’t know everything.
My wife does not have a degree. Until last year, when she retired, she worked in the Office of the President of a state university as the President's Assistant. She ghost-wrote articles and speeches for the president — for *three* different presidents, each with their own voices, in such a way that no one would suspect the president didn't write them. She had other duties as well, and she evolved her job to add more as needed.
A few years ago the university rewrote the job descriptions for the administrative side. If Deb wanted to go back to work and apply for her old job, she couldn't; it now needs a bachelors degree (masters preferred). Because that's much easier to evaluate on a resumé than all the skills she *actually* had.
My wife reads constantly, she keeps up with current events, she held her own at campus events for over 15 years with PhDs and people who would have looked down their nose at her if they'd known she didn't have a diploma. But she would agree that young people need teachers who teach and then hold them to task to demonstrate that learning, because not everybody (and she's looking at nieces and nephews with more education and fewer smarts) can pull themselves up.
I took creative writing for a year at university and I hated it. It was airy-fairy, I couldn't connect with the tutor and felt totally out of place with the rest of the class. It was very disheartening after enjoying writing at school and feeling like I was kind of good at it for so long. I do have a degree in law and practiced as an attorney for a few years, and it was quite a challenge adapting to a legal way of writing - it's quite funny now when people who are used to my professional writing style read some of my "creative" work!