Woman Called Out For Saying Her Husband Is 'Not Well Educated Or Well Read' Because He's In The Military
She humiliated him in front of her friends, and it sparked a conversation about the value of other kinds of education.
Africa images, Jacob Lund, pixelshot / Canva Our society and workforce places so much importance on higher education it can often seem like the only possible way forward, and it makes it all too easy that education comes in many forms other than a piece of paper from a university.
It can also easily turn into a way to judge people for their life choices, even if inadvertently, if they elected not to go to college. One woman online seems to have fallen prey to this wrong-headed view, and it's stirred up a lot of drama with her husband and sparked an important conversation in the process.
The woman called her military husband 'not well educated' because he joined the Navy instead of going to college.
There's no doubt about it: joining the military is not for the faint-hearted. The physical, mental and emotional demands are in many ways far more intense that practically any mainstream career, and the distance from family and loved ones that is often required adds a whole extra layer most of us don't have to think about.
It's no wonder that business coaches and gurus frequently mine the military for insights to help others in their careers.
That's at odds, of course, with the images many outside the military have of service members — that they're lower-income, unsophisticated, not deep thinkers, the types who just like to work with their hands and blow stuff up, and all the other dim-witted, reductive, snobbish stereotypes so many of us apply to those in the armed services.
This perception likely comes in part from the fact that the military heavily recruits from low-income and minority neighborhoods and schools. But the actual data about military members suggests these perceptions are probably far more rooted in classism and judgmental attitudes about what kind of work does and does not constitute an intellectual pursuit.
This, for lack of a better word, snootiness reared its ugly head at a recent gathering of friends with a military member and his highly educated spouse, as she shared in a post to Reddit.
During a conversation about books at a party, she mocked her husband as 'not well read' because of his favorite book.
The woman writes that her husband, Will, a member of the US Navy, works on nuclear reactors on submarines — real dumb-dumb stuff (he wrote, sarcasm coursing through his veins like venom). We can probably all agree that anyone working on nuclear reactors is no slouch in the brain-power department; despite what "The Simpsons" depicted, you have to be pretty adept to work on a dang nuclear reactor.
But his wife and her friends certainly don't seem to see it that way. At a recent party, a guest asked Will what his favorite book is, and Will responded that he loves Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird."
The guest gave Will "a quizzical look" and asked him, "Have you read any books outside of high school?" Will's response was far kinder than mine would have been — obviously embarrassed, after a moment's hesitation he replied, "Outside of manuals at work, I guess I haven’t."
This is already cringe enough to snap your clavicles, but it got even worse. By way of an explanation, Will's wife said, "Oh yeah, he’s not well educated, so he’s never had a reason to be well read," adding that "we all had a good laugh, but then Will didn’t really contribute a whole lot to the conversation the rest of the night."
Unsurprisingly, Will was furious, and he and his wife got into an argument on the way home. "I didn’t tell my friends that he was unintelligent," the woman writes, "just that he wasn’t college educated. He accused me of minimizing how hard his Navy schooling was, but I explained that military education and college education are simply not the same."
His wife's attitude traffics in tired, classist tropes about military members that aren't even true, according to the data.
His wife is right about military and college educations being "simply not the same" in one sense. It's not like you study Plato in Basic Training.
But the real point is this: So what? How is learning how to fix nuclear reactors, for God's sake, not an education? And on what basis, other than ones based in retrograde judgments about class, is one more valuable than the other?
I have a degree in theater and part of a master's in film production. You're telling me those pieces of paper are more valuable than knowing how to fix nuclear reactors?
As a creative person I am duty-bound to argue that art is just as important as tangible skills like nuclear reactor repair, and I believe that to be true for the most part, but art and "college degree in theater" are two completely different things.
Will's wife and her friends seem to think there's more virtue in a piece of paper than there is in actual knowledge. Which is a pretty silly way to think for someone so educated, to be quite frank. And it really only makes any sense in the context of the aforementioned long-held stereotypes about military personnel that, it turns out, aren't even remotely true.
According to Military.com, one of the armed forces' main news outlets, the vast majority of military members come from the same backgrounds as most college students — the middle class. They also have a vastly higher rate of completing high school, at 90%, than the general population.
And as for smarts? Most military members tend to be higher achievers in both verbal and mathematical skills, and an acumen for both is considered among the biggest indicators of success both in training and in job performance. Meanwhile I, with my one-and-a-fraction degrees and a list of books I've read a mile long, can barely add and substract with any reliability.
Degrees don't confer an education or intelligence. Curiosity and experience do, whether in a classroom or on the job. And especially since the value of a college degree is declining and an education is financially out of reach for the overwhelming majority of Americans unless they're willing to debilitate themselves with crushing debt for the rest of their lives, it's time we all — Will's wife included — start changing our attitudes.
As one Reddit commenter put it, "my 'uneducated' husband’s military experience and certification is what pays our bills. Wanna know what my education does for us? It collects dust and costs us a lot of money." So stick that in your "well educated" pipe and smoke it!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.