Reflections on Playboy: Seth Rogen, give yourself credit for wisdom as a teen

April 18, 2009

Seth Rogen, give yourself credit for wisdom as a teen

Playboy: In your high school yearbook you railed against the uselessness of education. You wrote, “Ever since I started earning more than my own teachers, everything kind of fell into perspective.” Do you still feel that way, or was it the egotism of youth?

[Seth] Rogen: I can’t defend it. I wrote that when I was 17 years old and I’d just made $30,000 on Freaks and Geeks, which at the time seemed like a fortune. But still, I was such a fucking cocky little asshole.

—Playboy Interview, April 2009

I can’t let you sell your younger self short, Mr. Rogen. It was not cockiness but self-respect that moved you then. Fresh eyes often see the most clearly. If no one in North America had ever seen a high school before, it would look like the pointlessly repressive waste of time that it is. But for the fact that misery loves company, parents wouldn’t force their children to endure such nonsense.

Extra money in your pocket per se didn’t make you wiser than your teachers, but the money serves as a powerful symbol of the possibilities denied to young adults who are confined to so many hours of clerical slave labor. As John Taylor Gatto has explained, school as we know it came from the misguided condescension of the Progressive Era. The cocky assholes in this situation are not teenagers but the utopian social engineers who would rule them.

A related earlier post:
I deeply resent my schooling—and you should resent yours

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:14 PM

brettbum left this comment at April 19, 2009 9:02 PM
I think you nailed it. :) School is for creating robots these days. I wish I had woken up earlier, maybe before spending a fortune on 2 degrees and a master's on top of that. (seriously)
I learned a lot from school, but I could have gotten a lot more from the things I was doing out of school.
I was lucky to go to grade school/ high school twenty years ago. I watch what my kids are going through these days in public school (which i used to be for) and I can't believe the garbage they are getting.

hell my wife is even a teacher. :)

PS you have (and have had for sometime) a great blog. you should really look into upgrading it to wordpress. You'll get a lot more out of it. I surfed through from blog explosion, which of course kicked me out when I tried to leave this comment. :) no matter that, but you could do a lot more in WP than blogger.

Brian Sorgatz left this comment at April 19, 2009 11:41 PM
BrettBum, I thank you for your suggestion about Wordpress. But I believe my first job in improving my blog is to ramp up the output. First I’ll learn to do more writing per month, then maybe I’ll see about a technical upgrade.

Kimberly left this comment at April 20, 2009 10:05 AM
It's amazing how much we've bought in to the false promises of higher education. My family's various incomes are almost inversely proportional to their level of education. And yet everyone seems hesitant to say what's becoming more and more apparent: college is an anachronistic hell-hole of mediocrity, and there are no guarantees in life. Success rests in what you do with knowledge, not where you obtain it or how many pieces of paper confirm it.

Found you on blogexplosion. You're fabulous.

Brian Sorgatz left this comment at April 20, 2009 12:57 PM
“Fabulous”? Bless your heart!

Us... left this comment at April 22, 2009 1:23 PM
I love Seth Rogen. Big big fan

April 18, 2009

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