Why I hate the current trend of "education is not for everyone"
Without any respect whatsoever I consider articles and memes currently trending about how "education is superfluous" just plain horse manure.
I remember my grade school teacher when I was a kid. She was trying to convince me that all I had to do in life was follow my dad's footsteps and just become a car mechanic, whereas her daughter, a classmate of mine, was destined / entitled to become the next generation of educated peoples. Irony intended.
Contrary to my teacher's coaxing, because coaching it was not, I got superfluously educated to the point of having three technical degrees. I also published a couple of papers as a consequence of my degrees. That has helped me tremendously in putting food to my family's table during the current crisis period where jobs are scarce. I do not know what happened to my classmate, I hope she got a proper education too.
This kind of redric "education is not for everyone" smacks horribly of a return to the middle ages where only the elite could legally be educated.
Granted a degree is not education in and by itself, and some degrees are probably worthless, but those are the exceptions that define the rule.
Granted some people can do / have done well without a degree. Quite frankly I have huge respect for self taught people, they are indeed exceptional.
Granted the student debt situation absolutely needs to be fixed but that does not entitle us to raise a wall of apartheid to citizens less lucky than us.
Just imagine modern life without computers, lasers, the internet etc. All these sprang from the minds of university teachers and students, and that has been the foundation where everyone can build upon having graduated or not.
P.S. My dad grew up during WWII and had absolutely no chance of getting educated, but that is another story !
GNU/Linux-based human since 1999 || DevOps Engineer since 2015 || Also: MA ESST/STS science, technology, & society
9 年Yes, I strongly agree on this one. Oh boy and I do feel very strongly on such matters. One somewhat related example I'd like to share: Every single day I see too many people who strongly believe that the mere acts of reading and writing take "too much effort". They hate it, they don't want it, they perceive it as nuissance and they've never learned to appreciate it. They remember it as something one "has to do", like stupid annoying homework in school, and this image stays for the rest of their life. Consequence is that they miserably fail each time they are confronted with situations in which they can't avoid doing it. Now all of this is not saying anything just yet. Not until one realizes, that these are the exact same people who easily spend a third of their time grinding away on so-called social media, and suddenly reading and writing is effortless? I don't see the difference, maybe I'm the one who's ignorant, but letters stay letters, text stays text and "TL;DR" doesnt exists. Hell, I've read Tolkien like so many others before me, reading is amazing... Also, no one knows how to touch type anymore, it's not a desireable skill to have and if you're doing it you must be some kind of no-life monk-magician, of course, there is no other explanation. And yes, on top of that, absolutely nobody knows how to independently use a general purpose personal computer anymore, people don't even seem to appreciate the concept. My Grandma (age 89) is running around with a phone in her purse that has more computing power than the netbook I'm typing this on but she proclaims that she "hates computers" and that she "will never touch one in her life",- I've given up trying to tell her that she's already using computers every single day whether she realises it or not. I will also never be able to explain the concept, let alone the neccessity of "login credentials" to her. She refuses to listen, so I let her be. Generally, people seem to prefer toddler-language style interfaces that have a maximum of two expressions "doo-doo" and "gah-gah" (yes, somebody said the same about the mouse + desktop metaphor UX in the past; I tend to agree and I believe that someone might have been Neil Stephenson) over true semantic expressiveness wich I am prepared to accept, BUT they tell me that my computer MUST BE BROKEN (yes because they always seem to know it better) when they see me working on a shell (because "that's MS-DOS" and "nobody is able to use THAT" and "this must be a system from the 1980's" etc...) or when they are without looking at the screen once blindly peck-and-hunt typing an entire sentence on my keyboard which surprise-surprise, doesn't have have the obnoxious qwerty layout.
Public Policy Economist_Gen Acc Off_MoF
9 年The big Question is: Education for Everyone according to his/her "Talents", personality etc..edu-talent - book from high-school...such a society could work better for humans...such a society does not exist!!
Information Security Professional
9 年Empirical data: I know PhDs that all they do is get in the way of others. I know self-taught devops their company totally depends on them. Population ratio? 10:1. Salary ratio? 3:1.