Elitism, education, and high school drop outs

[noamnety]

One of the common threads I'm seeing in the people who are pissed at Snowden is the jab that he's a high school drop out.

Can we talk about what that means to people here? Do we feel superior to folks who have less education than us? Is that true for college education as well? Or just high school? Do we equate graduating from high school with intelligence? Is it a general classism thing?

How's that translate to feelings toward demographics where high school graduation rates are significantly lower than the rest of the population?

[MichiganVote]

1. It means that some punk w/o a HS diploma gets a 6 figure job at

government expense while parents all over the country are trying to support their kids on a hell of a lot less pre-during-post HS and College just to get themselves or their kid any job. If you can't see the irony, you're not in that boat.

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. That's just stupid

since having a high school diploma isn't proof of competence or knowledge. I don't really see a problem with someone who's qualified and possesses the requisite skills being hired, even if they don't happen to have a very expensive piece of paper that says they know what they know.

[MichiganVote]

4. Thank you. I knew someone would save me from thinking rationally.

1. How do we know he was/is qualified?
2. How can his competence be defined as satisfactory when confidentiality was 100% of his job?
3. Were his "skills" used for the job or for his own ideas/ideals?

[noamnety]

7. Interesting questions

1. Sounds like he was qualified technically to do the work, or he wouldn't have gotten/kept the job and got promoted to that level. That's a common thing in the computer world, though. My dad was a second level manager at IBM, worked his way up from the mail room, taught himself programming, etc. He did finish high school, but I don't think he finished even the first year of college.

2. On his ability to keep confidentiality, obviously no, he didn't do that. But I don't believe that's related to having a high school diploma. The only way I could maybe see a connection is that to be really successful in high school, maybe you need to be able to go along with the crowd, obey authority, not question things too much - and someone who is capable of the work but opts to go down a different path has a propensity toward thinking outside the box, which might have a correlation to becoming a whistleblower or spy (depending on which way you define him).

3. His skills were used for the job initially, I assume - and ultimately to further his ideals. Most people probably aspire to a job where those two things match. I'm a little stumped on that because I do think checks and balances rely on people being able to stand up for their ideals even when it's not in the best interest of their employer. The situation with police comes to mind, where the best thing for a department is for a cop to cover for another cop, so the community maintains trust. But the best thing for the citizen who is victimized by another cop is for one of them to come forward.

[MichiganVote]

9. You are weighing the same arguments re: ethics that are taught in HS&College.

However, not usually associated with Computer classes or programming. A curious gap in programming considering.

But, since you are pondering in place of arguing like most of DU, consider,

1. We have no proof that he was, in fact, competent technically. Since it seems evident that this company did not provide oversight and we cannot know at this point if Snowden was guided in his efforts by others, he may have been a mere fake. There is not much that is known about this company or of the company he has kept.

2. Plenty of youth question authority in HS. Just ask any HS teacher. The issue is not whether he completed HS, the issue is that he got the job in the first place. Why? Why did this guy get this job when we all know there are scores of IT professionals as "competent" or more? How do we know that Snowden "thought outside the box", a curious form of thinking when its evident that he clearly stole information that was not his to share. If he was thinking outside the box and that should be his defense, every felon in prison owes you a beer.

3. Right. We are all making assumptions because we do not have facts. Snowden did not lack from opportunities to stand up for his ideals in other ways. So why this? You analogy based on a trust factor is weak. People are simply not going to "trust" the Snowden line-I broke the law or company confidentiality or state secrets or whatever but trust me it is for the greater good. Personally I am not persuaded that Snowden and his cronies (and I am positive he had those) give a damn about my trust or anyone else's.

4. I personally find it understandable that in the broader public, Snowden is viewed with disdain and disgust because he was given an employment opportunity that can be envied. Few will believe he is a Robin Hood given the present economic difficulties.

[noamnety]

16. I raised the ethics questions

not because they are taught in high school or college, but because they are the questions that come up on polygraphs for those types of positions.

Ethics might be taught in high school, but I'm disgruntled at the suggestion that people who don't complete a high school degree are somehow less ethical than those who do because they haven't "learned" ethics. I don't think that's true.

[MichiganVote]

34. Nor do I. But his entire life is fair game. He chose

His behaviors. When we choose our behaviors, it doesn't always follow that we get to choose the consequences. Rightly or wrongly, with or without ethical intent,with or without a HS diploma, he made his choice.

[noamnety]

35. His entire life is fair game - that's the part I'm questioning.

I understand most of us have some pretty strong feelings on what he actually did.

What I'm asking about in this thread is specifically why people are using his status of having a GED as a means to discredit someone.

Is that a valid thing we want to do in our society? Or is it a form of elitism/classism/something else? For the people who think his GED is an issue, I'm wondering if and how they apply that standard of judgment to other people they meet.

[yeoman6987]

32. That's just stupid

Having a High School Diploma is just one aspect that employers look for when they higher someone. I guess I should say education is one aspect. I think many hear are a little jealous that they don't made 122,000 a year. To be honest, I would love to make that much. I have a Master's and don't make near that. However, we all have choices and decisions to make and it seems that perhaps Snowden made better decisions on career than I did.

[noamnety]

33. I'm not sure employers even consider a high school diploma

once you have some college under your belt. They look at the highest level of education completed - like you said - as one aspect.

When I was about the same age as Snowden is now, I was a GS13 (civilian equivalent of roughly a Lieutenant Colonel), without a high school diploma or GED. So his pay scale seems high - but not unbelievable for a contractor, if he had the skills to back it up. One thing that adds to salary is if you can combine some sort of technical skill with the more general background knowledge. For me once I was a contractor, that was graphics plus military intelligence, which gave me a somewhat unique ability to both analyze and communicate information. (Big Edward Tufte fan here!) That made me more marketable than if I just had the art background but needed people tell me what to put in the charts, or if I had the intel background but no real grasp of how to use the info for effective briefings.

I'm guessing Snowden's salary reflected that he could do the hacking/IT part, but also had enough background knowledge from previous jobs at NSA and embassies and even reading political blogs, to be able to hone in on what was important. (Pure speculation on my part there.)

[noamnety]

3. So you think it's resentment?

I read it as disdain for people without a high school diploma, like that makes him a loser.

I wasn't picking up that it was more resentment that he could be successful without one, I have to contemplate that in the context of the other posts now.

[MichiganVote]

5. Maybe he is a loser. Plenty of people w/ or w/o a diploma who are.

[FarCenter]

6. The psychology of secret agents is quite interesting --

I'm reading "The Art of Betrayal -- The Secret History of MI6".

What made someone like Penkovsky take such crazy risks? The unbalanced nature of such spies, the CIA officer argued, was reflected in his own experince of agents.

All of them have been lonely people .. [who] have manifested some serious behaiour problem - such as alcoholism, satyriasis, morbid depression, a psychopathic pattern of one type or another, an evasion of adult responsibility... It is only mild hyperbole to say that no one can consider himself a Soviet operation officer until he has gon through the sordid experience of holding his Soviet 'friend's' head while he vomits five days of drinking into the sink.

A retire MI6 man agrees. 'Most agents wer unattractive people. Half were nasty characters who you wouldn't want to spend much time with. It was a very strange relationship when you meet them in some woods and he hands you som Minox and begins telling you about his life'.

"Normal people aren't Traitors, Dick White once declared.

Dick White rose to become head of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service.

[noamnety]

8. I should probably add in a disclaimer here.

I dropped out of high school at 16 after finishing 10th grade, and don't have a high school diploma or GED. It's felt a little like a punch in the gut each time I see someone latch onto that dropout thing like it's some kind of badge of shame. It's been bothering me.

[Mariana]

15. It's bullshit.

I went to high school in a district that had a very high dropout rate, so I knew a good number of people who quit school. A couple of them are still my friends today. Most who left school without graduating had good reasons for doing so.

[rrneck]

10. I think it has more to do with scoring points off somebody. nt

[Silver Swan]

11. My spouse never graduated high school.

In fact, he attended school only sporadically after age twelve. I didn't meet him until he was age 48, and he had a good career in IT. He is not dumb, in fact he is one of the more intelligent people I have known.

[Waiting For Everyman]

12. I've noticed too, the hostility about this toward Snowden.

It doesn't speak very well for people who hold ignorant attitudes like this.

For one thing, a piece of paper doesn't demonstrate someone's skills. It's only a tool for gatekeepers, to force people into paying off the system. It also relieves employers/interviewers of the effort of evaluating a person by using their own judgment. Either 1), the person interviewing doesn't have the critical thinking skills to make such judgments; or 2) they aren't trusted by someone higher up to do so adequately. Both shortcomings are on the part of the evaluator, not the evaluatee.

It so happens that Snowden didn't finish high school due to an illness. My two kids quit high school due to rampant crime in the school, which authorities refused to addresss. They both "advance placed" into college and graduated with terrific grades.

People without a GED at all can be just as skilled as anyone who has the piece of paper to say so. Back in the "old days" (of the Founding Fathers for instance), people used to be self-taught through reading, and learning-by-doing. Guess what, it still works.

[liberal_at_heart]

13. there is absolutely elitism on this board. Just try advocating for students in

poverty stricken schools who are at risk of dropping out. Apparently it is all their fault and don't deserve chances to redeem themselves. Hell, just try advocating for poverty stricken schools at all. Try advocating for funding public schools. You won't get far here. As far as Snowden's level of education, well, people will use anything against someone they disagree with. It's their way of feeling superior, another wonderful quality of many here on DU, superiority.

[struggle4progress]

14. The career trajectory is quite odd: high school dropout, junior college courses, GED,

quick termination from Army stint, NSA watchman, more junior college courses, posted by CIA at US Geneva embassy, Dell, then a job doing work at BAH for NSA

Junior college typically means freshman and sophomore level college courses

He apparently grew up among national security folk at NSA

That thin resume suggests NSA or CIA employment didn't come to him because he had real credentials but because he had connections in the national security community

[Puzzledtraveller]

17. It's the defining characteristic for some.

Smug arrogance.

[Recursion]

18. Some of the best sysadmins I've worked with had little formal education

It's a field that doesn't have good classroom programs (perhaps can't have good classroom programs?) so it's difficult to hire on credentials. When I've been involved in hiring decisions the best indicator has pretty much just been general problem-solving exercises, along with just generic technical trivia ("what's the difference between using backquotes and using xargs?", "Write a regular expression to match any valid US phone number.", etc.)

[noamnety]

22. That's how I used to hire too - for graphics.

I was a research analyst for a competitor to Booz Allen for a few years, and when we hired the graphics people, I would look at resumes of course, but the determining factor was giving them a god awful set of slides, and watching them work on the computer to fix them. We were able to weed out people who claimed they knew the graphics software on their resume but clearly couldn't function in it - and weed out people who didn't have the design sense to look at absolutely crap and figure out what needed to be fixed.

[XemaSab]

19. One of the smartest people I know

dropped out of high school. He's now making 6 figures in IT.

High school was a waste of his time. Seriously.

[penultimate]

23. High school is such a small fraction of time in ones lives too.

A small portion of our lives, while we're still kids. After awhile, our high school careers are pretty much irrelevant (whether we did well or did poorly) Once we start out post-secondary education and/or our careers, that's what matters. Particularly in IT-type fields, where informal or semi-formal education is easy and cheap to come by, and where it's expected that we constantly continue to learn.

I'm not dismissing formal education, btw... I plan on getting my MSc in network security once things settle down for me.

[penultimate]

20. I find comments that put him down for it to be bothersome, but I get why some people are WTF about

the whole thing. Going from HS dropout with no solid college education, to a high paying position in network security at the NSA is pretty strange. I assume it's because the guy is smart and has the discipline to self-educate. I for one do not hold that against him at all. The fact he was able to get into his positions without the formal education only gives me more admiration for his intelligence and skill set. Although that is totally separate from my opinions on his actions after he got there (I'm still going back and forth with what I think)

[noamnety]

24. That feels like a separate thread to me

but I might be missing where you are going with it.

[JustAnotherGen]

26. +1

[noamnety]

27. I don't think anyone's arguing that on any level.

But I am suggesting that we don't need to demonize individuals who don't complete high school or get GEDs.

That's a different statement than demonizing the system.

[mike_c]

28. I have a PhD but dropped out of high school-- twice....

I took the GED exam in West Virginia while in my early 20s. Now I'm winding up a successful academic science career. Failure to finish high school is only relevant, in my mind, if that failure is your greatest lifetime accomplishment. Otherwise, meh.

[noamnety]

29. What's your reaction to the "high school dropout" comments about Snowden?

Are you finding them annoying, or something that didn't even register for you?

[mike_c]

30. I find his having not completed HS irrelevant...

...and peoples' remarking upon it annoys me as much as criticizing his taste in ties would annoy me. It's clearly meant to cast him in a bad light, which is directly equivalent to saying he's so gay or he throws like a woman-- labeling him as a member of a group one holds in disdain. That disdain speaks volumes about the folks who harbor it, IMO.

[Marr]

31. The people who do that are authoritarians. To them, Snowden's educational history show's

that he is an outsider and not an establishment-approved insider as is his perceived foil, Obama. People like that always side instinctively with the stronger individual.

Look up an old thread related to police abuse and you'll find the same people siding with the police.