because people where sold on the “You will never succeed if you don’t go to college”
One issue is that I think many kids and young adults do not appreciate their opportunity to be educated because they have never had a job or needed to care for themselves on their own.
I think at a certain age it would do a lot of good to slow down with education and instead work - like, part time high school (provided you are working), or take a 2 year gap between high school and college.
Most people are way more smart than they think, I just think that everyone learns at a different pace, and instead of rushing education, in terms of pushing kids and young adults as fast as possible through it, does more damage than good for many
It’s not just that as I’ve pointed out before. The marketing forces behind higher ed convinced so many Americans that the so-called “American Dream” meant having your kid go to a four year college. These marketing forces also got Americans to look down upon people who work in trades as not being “thinkers.” So if want stature in this life that meant having a so-called “white-collar” job where you use your mind and your hands.
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Good.
- We definitely have an education problem in this country.
- Throwing more money at the same process definitely will not help. The problem is not lack of money spent.
- Much of the problem seems to be rooted in K-12 and the declining family structure
- Those problems MIGHT have become so severe that it makes sense to send fewer kids to college. (Given the age 0-18 problems college no longer does what it should.)
- But if the problem really is at the K-12 and family levels, reducing the number of kids who go to college is treating a symptom.
consider- 50 years ago, a high school diploma meant you had the education of today’s associate degree holder… not to mention that various trades were taught in most high schools as well
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I would say bachelor’s
“Kids these days don’t even know shorthand, or how many firkins equal a butt!”
“Kids comin’ up nowdays, don’t even know how to tie down their punkins…”
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Like this?
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I urged my kids growing up to either get a trade or go to college to avoid the sweat shop/ burger flipper jobs.
They chose college and while not becoming wealthy they are doing ok. Especially with their spouses with similar pay levels.
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My Dad worked for Erie Lackawanna Railway way back in the day. I always loved that word.
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The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
H.L. Menchken
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The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
H.L. Mencken
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Wow, that sounds exactly like a tech school.
Reinventing the wheel, are we?
I disagree completely if I understand you correctly.
Management is a craft. As is leadership. How does college teach this craft? Who is teaching it?
College is not about your first 5 jobs. It’s about your last 5. Unfortunately the way the system is designed, that knowledge has to lay dormant for a long time in most cases. So long its value (retention) is dubious at best.
Here’s another thing; once one rises to a certain level, one is usually no longer a technician. One enters the business of people - a much more difficult field.
I once heard a senior manager who was having a rough go, kind of talking to himself, say " We get hired for our technical abilities. We get fired for our people skills." It’s been some years, but it really stuck with me. He was right.
We don’t set people up for success, we have zero tolerance for failure (a whole problem in itself) and we have completely unrealistic expectations. We also micromanage them to drive exact outcomes measured on a minute by minute basis.
There’s no capacity or resilience in the systems. The VUCA is incredible. Then we set a half-trained human in the middle of it and tell them “Be perfect!”
When you stop and think about it, it’s retarded.
Easily 80% of working as an educator involved classroom management, i.e. dealing with all the personalities.
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That should have been people skills. Sorry.
Mmmmmm
