Re:Is College Working?
by DanielBMarkham on Friday January 30, 2009 @10:29AM
(#458184)
Is it time for the U.S. to rethink it's educational model?
No. We do not have a model for all education. That's centralized planning, which doesn't work. What we need to re-think is what activities we encourage by financing. We heavily finance 4 years of student activity that, by this author's account, does not prepare students for providing for their own needs after school. In short, we're creating 22 and 24-year-olds without the chutzpah that a common street hustler has at age 15. And we're paying lots of money to do it.
Education has always been about goals. I love the fuzzy goals like appreciation of arts, understanding of various philosophical schools, sensitivity to world cultural differences -- things that you absolutely need but are hard to measure. Problem is, you can subsidize things that are hard to measure. There's no quality control. There's no standard to say whether institution X is doing any better or worse than institution Y.
People, young or old, need to be able to adapt to find a spot in a complex society where they can provide value to the rest of us in such a fashion that we formally thank them -- that is, we give them money. That's job #1. That's something we have a public interest in advocating.
More worrisome is that groupthink that colleges instill. It's always there under the surface, as in this quote from the article:
One newly-minted MBA said that if worse comes to worst, he'll stay at home and look after the baby he and his wife are expecting...."provided," the reporter remarked, "his wife still has her job."
If worse comes to worse he'll actually raise his own kid, instead of having somebody else do it for him. The sacrifices we must make.
No. We do not have a model for all education. That's centralized planning, which doesn't work. What we need to re-think is what activities we encourage by financing. We heavily finance 4 years of student activity that, by this author's account, does not prepare students for providing for their own needs after school. In short, we're creating 22 and 24-year-olds without the chutzpah that a common street hustler has at age 15. And we're paying lots of money to do it.
Education has always been about goals. I love the fuzzy goals like appreciation of arts, understanding of various philosophical schools, sensitivity to world cultural differences -- things that you absolutely need but are hard to measure. Problem is, you can subsidize things that are hard to measure. There's no quality control. There's no standard to say whether institution X is doing any better or worse than institution Y.
People, young or old, need to be able to adapt to find a spot in a complex society where they can provide value to the rest of us in such a fashion that we formally thank them -- that is, we give them money. That's job #1. That's something we have a public interest in advocating.
More worrisome is that groupthink that colleges instill. It's always there under the surface, as in this quote from the article:
One newly-minted MBA said that if worse comes to worst, he'll stay at home and look after the baby he and his wife are expecting...."provided," the reporter remarked, "his wife still has her job."
If worse comes to worse he'll actually raise his own kid, instead of having somebody else do it for him. The sacrifices we must make.