Reflections

I think the essay proceeds by using to sets of alternatives, actually distinct, but sometimes conflated here. There's the opposed pair: "about learning" and "about getting a job." That these are strictly alternates is nowhere demonstrated, and in fact it isn't true. I am trying, in each of my courses in different ways, to help students learn and to help students learn about and choose their careers, for example, and I think that's a consistent position to take. Then there's the idea that security consists in having a job, and that not being someone's employee is insecure. Here too, I wonder why the unexamined premise gets smuggled in. Experience, including experience you relate, shows that having a job is not the same thing as security. While the possession of a license to solicit and represent clients that no one can take away except on a very difficult showing of cause--which from a defeasibility point of view is essentially the same as academic tenure, the most secure form of employment in our savage employment system--is nothing to sneeze at from the security point of view. If, that is, one puts not only enough intellectual equity into the license to develop several areas of profitable expertise, but also develops a network capable of promoting your areas of expertise among potential clients. But networks and knowledge, like the license, are basically indefeasible: whatever you build is solid for a lifetime.

So, when the rather artificial nature of those oppositions is reconsidered, why doesn't the analysis point in the end quite another way?