Higher education and cruelty: the price of knowing beyond one’s station
(The suicide rate is high among dentists, and in the medical profession more generally. At first, that might seem no less strange than the fact that my own occupation does not even appear on those lists. But both facts make sense if we consider the type of person who normally works in the medical profession and the type who normally ends up in a job like mine. It may be read as a contrasting note to what follows.)
‘It may be a question’, Chesterton said, ‘which of the two methods [medieval or modern] was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous.’
I would say it is likewise clear which is the more cruel.
A case like mine — in regard, for instance, to the means of livelihood alone — should not exist, and it is a form of cruelty that is both easily avoidable and, indeed, was avoided by every society before ours. Higher education should not be available to those destined to play an inferior role.
Naturally, there were always cases of people who received higher education and later proved unworthy of it, but none of those people ended up doing the filthiest work. And no one who did the filthiest work had ever been given a higher education.
Among the latter, there were undoubtedly people who would have deserved higher education and would have achieved brilliant things had they received it — but at least they would never come to know that. They knew nothing beyond the inferior role assigned to them and therefore, whether or not they were worthy of something higher, they did not have to endure the knowledge that they would spend their lives confined to that narrow, subhuman existence.