Summary Of This Is Water By David Foster Wallace

Why is education so important? Is it because of how much you’ll make at your high end job or is it because it is essential to function as a “well-rounded” human being? Education is important because along the way you acquire sets of skills like critical thinking, which are useful for the everyday life. However, people who do not pursue a higher education after they graduate are not less intelligent and should not be looked down upon, because schooling isn’t only about what you learn in the classroom. Instead, a true education involves learning to communicate and think more effectively with cognitive strategies, becoming more aware of other people who share the environment, and ultimately sharing your education and experience with others in

David Foster Wallace’s speech “This Is Water” makes various excellent points about the liberal arts education and its importance. Wallace claims that, the cliché that college teaches you how to think shouldn’t be offensive because, ”the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” (Wallace-1) Wallace makes a good point on the grounds that, when pursuing a higher education the goal shouldn’t be to acquire the most knowledge as possible, rather it should be about picking up the skills and habits through the coursework and outside activities. In the end, this ability to choose what to think makes us better people. This because we are more likely to take others into consideration and think about things through a wide perspective, rather than a narrow one. Furthermore, he also implies that we are slaves to the mind until we retrieve our freedom through conscious awareness while caring for others and not being selfish. In doing this we can be

Mike Rose wrote an article called “Blue- Collar Brilliance” where he talks about how labor jobs require much more thinking than they’re associated with and how we should appreciate those who have average jobs. Making these types of assumptions on large groups of people are making bigger a social divide between us and is immobilizing our ability to communicate with each other. Diminishing these stereotypes is crucial to be a more unified place, most importantly it is insulting and misleading. These people deserve more recognition for their hard work. In the opinion of Rose, manual labor is more difficult than one perceives. He goes on to give example of jobs we see as simple but are more elaborate; “Carpenters have an eye for length, line, and angle; mechanics troubleshoot by listening; hair stylists are attuned to shape, texture, and motion.” (Rose-#) As people with education, with the skills to think beyond the surface, we should stop categorizing these people in an uneducated way. One can make the argument that labor workers were just lazy and do not need recognition yet I would have to disagree due to the fact that labor jobs require so much more effort and work than an office job. Also, some might not feel the need to go to college because they like certain jobs, like plumbing, that don’t need a higher education apart for the