Comment by pascalxus
9 years ago
Making small talk is a skill, just like any other. You don't need to skip college to figure out how to small talk.
but the rest of the article is pretty interesting: the sense of entitlement, the one dimensional view of intelligence, and the SAT and prep track required to get to it all.
Somehow, this article reminded me of Catch in the Rye - especially the main character and his experiences in a prep school for college.
It’s not just a skill. If you’ve been mostly around people of the upper class, and in such schools as well – as the article says – you might be able to hold small talk with people from other countries, but not with people from your own country’s lower class.
There’s an entirely different way of life there, entirely different life experiences, which lead to entirely different priorities, things you think about, and so on.
I’ve been in both circles due to family, people from the very bottom, and people from the very top, and you can’t just say "making small talk is just a skill".
And the other things you mention are also artifacts of this education: You only see this one perspective of life, which is so very different from what many other people experience, that you never even consider what their life might look like.
Smalltalk, like any communication, requires that you have a mental model of the person you talk with, but if you share none of their experiences, you can’t build such a mental model.
Although I wouldn’t recommend skipping college, I definitely recommend people to at least try to find a way with which they can experience the life through the eyes of a person of another social class at least once.