Pretzel_Warrior
Pretzel_Warrior's JournalOk. the message on DU is clear. Be glad with what you might get, serf!
Yesterday, there was a link to a discussion about college degrees. Although the article was saying we're doing a disservice to the less fortunate by telling them higher education is a ticket out of poverty, the thread also seemed to veer into "education is not the key to prosperity".
Now today we have a thread saying "we shouldn't try to follow our dreams and do what we love--we should take that shitty sales job or become a garbage collector."
These are symptoms that our economic and education systems have been fucked up for far too long.
I will be telling my son to explore many paths in life and find out what he is good at and loves doing. He should try to make a career of that and get proper education to do so. I will be telling him how important higher education is in our increasingly complex world. To me, education in college programs is a great antidote to the lack of critical thinking skills in high school and the faith-based bullshit of religion.
I have no problem that others really like working on cars and they really want to go to a trade school to learn how to work on cars. It can be a nice living. But unless there are unions to protect jobs, that person is a specialist at the mercy of capital. As soon as the ownder jerks the job away to a new area, that person may find themselves unemployed with a very difficult way back into the work force.
No matter what people say, you SHOULD look for things that interest you and make you feel good about life while paying the bills. For some, that means being a biochemist looking for new cures. For others, that may mean building homes or working in landscape design.
Do not allow yourself to be a mindless cog in the machine of capitalism.
Farewell. It doesn't look like I'll get the book list compiled prior to the break. Instead....
I offer you a great list of lists. In my original post here, I include a link to Norwegian Book Club's list of 100 top works of literature. After reviewing ones from The New York times, Le Monde, BBC, and others, I felt this one was a little more fair to authors regardless of country or ethnicity.
The Norwegian Book Club chose not to rank each book in its relative place in the top 100 other than to say Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes received 50% more votes than other books and is at #1. The rest appear in alphabetical order.
http://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/28
1.Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry...
1984 by George Orwell
The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of perpetuating the regime's propaganda by falsifying records and political literature
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South, taking place before, during,...
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature.
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor....
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage...
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The novel, her fifth, is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner...
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
The story concerns a small-time criminal, Franz Biberkopf, fresh from prison, who is drawn into the underworld. When his criminal mentor murders the prostitute whom Biberkopf has been relying on...
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Blindness is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
The Book Of Disquietude or The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego in Portuguese), published posthumously, is one of the greatest works by Fernando Pessoa.
Selected works also included on the list are:
Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ramayana by Valmiki
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
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Gender: MaleHometown: where beer does flow and men chunder
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Member since: Sun Dec 16, 2012, 03:36 AM
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