Anti-Climacus

For the record (the comments at the post in question long since having moved in another direction), tongue was mostly in cheek when I commented on the Mindy Kaling article last week. 'Mostly' because while 'grad school' seemed to be the magic words that confirmed the person being discussed in the conversation was a boy rather than a man, the conversation was being held between two characters named 'Lululemon' and '32D.'

As to the more general question of whether 19-year olds should be writing op-eds in a student newspaper, I am quite certain that nothing will derail a 19-year old from thinking their view of the world is absolutely correct with no reservations. There's a reason, after all, that my archives from 2002 are hidden. Only age, and the experience of having been really wrong about something, will ever change that. In this respect, grad school is a good experience to have had: it's where I definitively learned that there is at least something wrong with every argument, and that constructing a positive argument of one's own is difficult. If that all works together properly, I think it should produce a sense of the limits of one's own knowledge and a sort of gracious willingness to let others speak about what they know better than you, which is potentially everything other than your own narrow expertise.

This implies, I think, that there's not much to do with 19-year olds. They have to be themselves, they need to have some professors who can effectively challenge the idea that the world is simple (or comprehensible), and time will take care of the rest, if anything ever will.