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Re:What is Penn's Educational Background? - 2006/01/19 19:49
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0603/steigerwald060303.asp
Q: Do you think college education is over-rated, under-rated or a hoax designed to get parents to pay for their kids' dating and drinking training?
A: I've always seen it as unless you're in the hard sciences, just going to college out of habit seems to me to be just about drinking and drugs and (having sex). Or just trying to delay being an adult, which I think is kind of stupid, because being an adult is so much better than being a kid.
All I wanted to do was get out of high school. Some people want to prolong that and I wanted to shorten it as much as possible. ... I think people who're 14, 15, 16 should be given more power and more freedom - and not try to keep them a child till 25, which is some of what college does. ... The whole idea of a liberal arts education seems foolish to me.
Q: Where did you go to college?
A: I did not go to college. I only finished high school on a plea
bargain. I finished high school because my SATs were high enough that
it would have embarrassed the school to flunk me.
The thing was, I'm from a dead factory town, Greenfield, Mass., which is
about 20 miles from Amherst. So while I was in high school they did
everything they could to keep me from going to classes and even showing
up, because they felt I was a problem.
I didn't have to go to high school for really any of my junior or senior
year, so I'd drive up the 20 miles to the five-college area, Amherst,
Mass. I would go to U Mass and Hampshire College and sit in on classes.
That's where I became completely disillusioned about the kind of college
that I would go to. ... I remember going there and talking to them about
how interested I was in Lenny Bruce and things like that.
They said to me, "Well, you can design your own course here at Hampshire
and work on this."
And I was going, "So the government can pay for me to do something I
could do on my own and have a slim chance of getting paid? My chances
of getting paid doing comedy at the age of 18 in Greenfield, Mass., are
hovering just above zero. But if I go to college, they go into negative
numbers. The money starts piling up that I don't make."
As it turned out, I made an enormous amount of money when I was 18 - for
me - street performing. I never, ever reached that amount of money again
until we we'd been off Broadway for six months.
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