Simplicity is not an easy task for the overly educated tribe.
Now there's a fine example of an oxymoron.
I could have said the excessively instead of overly but the later count took up less space to keep the diatribe down.
I could have said the excessively instead of overly
"Overly," "excessively" and "too" are, in the contest of your statement, synonymous; thus doing so would not have altered the oxymoronic nature of the remark.
Perhaps, however, you'd care to share with us just how one can have too much education. Frankly, I can't imagine that's possible. I think it's possible to make a qualitative judgment about how much education one needs or should have in various situations and life circumstances, but the notion that there is such a thing as
absolutely being over educated is preposterous.
As very wise person once told me that if you really desire to get someone people's attention speak as though talking to a kindergartner. Formal education, knowledge base and wisdom are not all one in the same even though some may believe that they are. One can be totally educated to the highest degree and yet still have the common sense total idiot.
if you really desire to get someone people's attention speak as though talking to a kindergartner.
Yes, I've also heard that saying. It's quite effective when one must convey instruction and one is well advised to use that approach in such instances.
I've observed, however, that when one speaks as though one were speaking to a kindergartener, one is quite likely to get kindergartener grade responses to one's adult remarks. Thus if one doesn't care to be responded to by children or adults who think and remark like children, it's best not to communicate as a child might.
Ultimately one should choose one's approach to communication based upon one's targeted audience, not based merely upon who might come by one's remarks.
One can be totally educated to the highest degree and yet still have the common sense total idiot.
Be that as it may, quite
often common sense is neither. Additionally, for whatever value so-called common sense has, it's certainly not the entirety of sense one must have; moreover, it's usually not nearly enough sense. To wit, think of how often people use common sense to choose/give an answer on an exam only to be wrong. Take a college-level course in macroeconomics and you'll come by many principles that are indeed so and that common sense, for most people, never indicates. Also, consider that common or any other kind of sense would tell one to do myriad things to be highly successful (at "whatever") and look at how many people do few or none of those things when in fact they should have done them religiously.
Let me offer a simple (highly summarized) example....
In the 1980s and '90s, the portent of the role of microprocessing were all over the place. It was on TV and in movie theaters as news and as entertainment. Countless authors wrote about the potential of computers and the impacts they would have on society. Common sense, assuming one had it, instructed one to prepare for the coming transformation wrought by the silicon chip.
How many people paid attention and prepared themselves for the change? Sure, millions did, but a lot of folks didn't, and now those who didn't are the vocal horde bemoaning that there are no physical labor jobs that pay well enough to sustain the "middle class" lifestyle they (or their parents) -- a lifestyle that because it was "middle class" provided them with the resources needed to purchase the requisite preparation -- once enjoyed.
Common sense tells one that while one may not like "what's inexorably coming," one must nonetheless be prepared to thrive once "it" arrives. Common sense says that what one likes doesn't much matter, what one does is what matters, and what one does had better be well thought out and reasonably effective, enough such that one isn't "f*cked" when the inevitable occurs.
Common sense says that one must go with the flow. Now, that doesn't mean just being a patsy; it means one finds a way to work with, not against, that which one cannot change. For example, we don't stop rivers, we figure out how to harness their power.
