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Maggie's FarmWe are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for. |
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Thursday, June 16. 2011The College-for-All Debate
I believe that, if you haven't gotten what you need to become an effective and self-motivated learner in high school, you never will. School is spoon-feeding, but real education is picking up the spoon yourself. The test of whether someone has deserved a higher education is afterwards: Do they continue with scholarly or self-educational pursuits, or do they rest on their paper laurels? Most people could learn to do their jobs through apprenticeships if a job is what they are after, and save the college cost. Most jobs are not rocket science, but most jobs expect ongoing learning of some sort, on one's own. I also believe that all education is self-education, and that a degree is an expensive piece of paper. See "I got my education at the New York Public Library," (which wonderful library, a source of learning for immigrants and scholars alike, had its 100th Aniversary last month). We easily forget that almost none of the remarkable achievers and contributors in human history ever had higher education, or more than elementary formal education, and that that continues to be true up through the present. America's "education system" is SNAFU, and "college education" is a racket designed to support Big Beer. Trackbacks
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Agreed. Completed college course, and particularly a degree, are often proxies for A) Average intelligence or better, B) some ability to complete tasks, and C) from a culture of aspiration. When people find other ways to convince employers they have those things, ways that don't cost tens of thousands of dollars, colleges are going to change forever.
(Those who hoped to find a spouse at college, as I did, see things with similar eyes. It was a great place to shop for a wife, and I knew that going in.) In the hard sciences there is considerable value in lab work, and a good instructor in any field can cut down the amount of time you have to spend wandering around by getting you to the key points quickly or answering questions. I mostly agree, but on the other hand I barely learned to be a self-starter in high school. It was college that really taught me to be a self-starter, in part because I was surrounded by people with an ability and a motivation that existed in only a tiny fraction of all the people I'd been surrounded by in high school. Once I'd caught the bug there, I was motivated for life, but I'm not confident what would have happened if I hadn't gone there. Luckily, when I was 18 or 19, it wasn't too late for me to learn how. I just needed the external heightened expectations for a while.
Well, my family would disagree about college being a waste of time. Tho we do think of college as a privilege, not a right (would not pay for it for a kid unless they had the aptitude and were working hard and getting good grades). But we believe that if a kid is going to go to college the emphasis should be academic, not trade school.
There should be more trade schools for the millions of kids who are currently wasting their time and taxpayer's money going to college and dropping out because they are not natural scholars. As AVI notes, there are certain subjects that can be better studied in a college environment with live peers and teachers, under the pressure of deadlines and with grades. Any monkey can read novels and study history on their own, after college, while straphanging to their dreary cubicle job, for example. But precious few of us have the mental discipline to plow through a textbook on statistics and do all the problems and figure out the bits we find confusing without the Fear of an F if we get it wrong. And not many people have as brilliant insights on their own into a complicated economic or governmental case study as a discussion group can come up with together, arguing, debating, and reworking solutions to a problem posed in a class. We all discover this as adults in things like church Bible studies where we think we understand a text until we find that that mild mannered lady from the back pew has seen something amazing in it that we never could have dreamed of. There is also the character building argument: in college smart conceited kids finally realize that they are just small fry next to the really brilliant ones. It's an important lesson. In youth, we are all of us totally full of ourselves and need to be brought down a peg or two so that we will behave in a work setting and be teachable enough to learn. In college this can happen relatively harmlessly (ie: without our getting fired). One hears other people far smarter than oneself, and realizes that one has to buckle down and learn something. Self-directed learners miss out on this. Also, as AVI said, college can be a great place to meet a future mate (tho I didn't meet mine til years later, we were actually in the same dorm at one point...) Here are some of the wastrels and losers from my own small finishing school. Yup, a college education is a real waste of money... Thomas Jefferson John Adams John Quincy Adams T.S. Eliot George Bush Theodore Roosevelt Oliver Wendell Holmes Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Adlai Stevenson John Hancock Horatio Alger Michael Crichton John dos Passos Ralph Waldo Emerson Sorry, Jefferson got tacked on in error (from another list)
I didn't meet my wife in college as I was indifferent to it then. Wasn't a priority. My wife did go to the same college as my first love, but some years later. (Coincidence, thy name is fate.)
Kahlenberg is an elitist.
He worries about stratification. He is right to be concerned about stratification if coursework and pathway decisions are to be imposed from above. It never enters into the mind of the typical CHE writer that parents and students should be free to choose between various alternatives. It never enters into their minds that one can start down one path and then change their mind to and wish to follow another path. The notion that there is a correct solution to the problem of education is a marker for whether or not you are en elitist. Let the people make choices. There is no one correct model for the nation. I sit here in my office listening to potential students tell me why they want an MBA. For most of them it has nothing to do with education and everything to do with the credential. I'm beginning to think, contra retriever's assertion about the fear of the F, that maybe education should be separated from testing and credentialing. I worked at a college for years and most of the students were there simply because they didn't want to work OR they had no other idea what to do with their lives. They were simply no adult enough to make a decision and their parents were still coddling them. Most of the students who fell into this category carefully selected the easist classes and used their free time to socialize. For most of them college was a party paid for by someone else.
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