While I'm going to be talking mostly about college, I'd implore you to read this article from the Atlantic, What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finald's School Success, but more over...
Education's sole purpose is not "to get a job". Or at least, this has not historically been the case. It has been the intent to educate people - and "education" and what's applicable to the corporate world are not always the same thing.
Valuable knowledge and the ability to understand art, philosophy, social sciences - this shapes thought, this thought shapes society, it shapes our ethics, or actions as citizen, these are things that can empower future leaders to be citizens that can see a bigger picture. These are subjects that give our work meaning and put our work in perspective. It's not what to think that's only important, it's not just a set of skills to do a job that are needed. It's knowing how to think that shapes the course of our society.
The problem with turning education merely into something that people consider directly "useful" is that you create a nation of people who do complex tasks, but who do not question why they are doing them, who these tasks benefit, etc.
Education has turned into nothing more than mere vocational training. It is increasingly people paying for their own job training - something companies used to provide to their employees on their dollar. People through this system become people who toil and follow direction, people who accept a top-down culture (increasingly shaped by corporations) without any kind of rebellion.
And you can see it's effects in youth culture - as the hippies turned to punks, punk grew to grunge and hip hop and rave culture and now you just have this cannibalistic hipster culture that cannibalizes itself. But look at the ethics about the establishment - every passing generation is more accepting than the last, every next generation defines its culture as consumer culture more than the last.
Now - even by the so called rebellious underground cultures - you're considered lame to be protesting "the man" or consumer/corporate culture. And I think, in part, this has to do with america getting away from having respect for thinkers. If you get anything from all I blab about and link to here, get this: Information is not the same as knowledge - and our education system is geared more and more towards information.
But look where we're at today. We (IMO) have too many people going to college, too many people being charged too much to go to college and then essentially become indentured servants for years after education (if they can get a job), and the quality of said education is going down as education is more likely to be vocational training for jobs and not actual education.
But a little history is needed to look at the big picture. At the end of the civil rights era it became illegal to not employ racial minorities from jobs and work places. At the time most companies both did not require you to have a college degree to perform a job, because, like today, college degrees say nothing about whether you can or cannot perform said job.
Look at modern jobs: HR assistants, administrative assistants, call centers, entry level IT workers, some rudimentary sales jobs, entry level graphic design jobs - these don't require college degrees as a means to prove you can do it but it's a prerequisite to being hired.
What is needed is job training. Job training has been slowly externalized - whether by intent or unintentional consequence is beyond me, but why?
Employers started requiring college degrees for simple jobs because it was an economic barrier to keep blacks out. This was largely off the books, unspoken and off the record and hard to substantiate. I used to have several links backing this up and have not been able to find them for some time. If anyone else can find anything backing this up i'd be glad to see it - but until then I suppose you can take my [citation needed] with a grain of salt.
This requirement for college degrees changed the national discussion about education and a number of government programs were eventually started to assist people to obtain college education.
As more people started getting college education, what education gave people started to change, away from something that leaned more towards hard academics and more towards "job training". As this occurred you started to see companies do away with their "on the job training". Because, by happenstance, the process and the expense was now externalized onto the citizen.
In the last 15+ years we've seen a boom in vocational accredited "universities" that are nothing short of diploma factories. These schools are expensive, they have no requirements for attendance really - your high-school GPA, your SAT scores, your ACT scores - none of that matters. But we're all told we need college degrees to get jobs, the government is willing to subsidize part of it, and people are free to sign their name on endless dotted lines.
These schools are the epitome of vocational training, but somehow they're accredited as if they're Clemson or Duke or Radford even. Academic courses are made to be blown through. Fake statistics are given from the schools like "95% of our graduates get jobs in their chosen fields" and they fail to mention to you that if you chose to work flipping burgers, well then you got a job in your chosen field. Devry, Strayer, University of Pheonix, South University, and hundreds more. PBS/Frontline did a good documentary on all this called College, Inc.. There's a small article covering it here.
But that documentary talks about the for-profits chains and online schools and other diploma factories. What about the actual colleges out there? They too have been corporatized and trivialized. You can start to look at this at this blog, How the American University was killed in 5 steps. The short of it covers the defunding of public higher education, the demoralization and impoverishment of professors, the dominance of an managerial and administrative class within the university system, and the insertion of corporate culture and money into the university system. I recommend reading the link.
On top of that, student life has been trivialized by a multi-billion dollar sports industry and the thought that Greek life and college life are one in the same. School, as it becomes a vocational training facility - has also become a means to entertain middle class and rich kids. Chris Hedges again, talks about this in the Perversion of Scholarship.
And when all is said and done this has profound impact on culture. We no longer respect thinkers. We mock English majors, we make fun of philosophers. STEM graduates sit around self assured of our own awesomeness constantly mocking art majors by posing the statement that they're degree means nothing more than a future of asking "Do you want fries with that?"
Do not get me wrong, there is a contradiction in our society - we need more STEM majors to be competitive - but we also need to find a respect of thinkers and these things do not have to be at odds with each other.
In America nothing is more important than making a buck. Never mind the fact that the educational world has been changed into mere vocational training and making us all into indentured wage slaves, because mere job training has been externalized into the regular citizen taking out loans. And why? It all started with rich white businessmen trying to keep blacks out by making it about "qualifications" rather than race.
Even today, the EEOC states that companies of certain sizes must employ a certain percentage of minorities based on the population demographics of the location of the companies. So the companies move further away high minority areas, or they staff minorities in low rung jobs. Anything higher than entry level IT, sales, managerial spots, etc. are still greatly white.
Companies do a little dance, and sometimes even opt to take on the EEOC fines rather than attempt to meet the reasonable quotas set unto them. Meanwhile, a portion of white people are convinced that affirmative action still means they have the short end of the stick now. Tell that to all the black males who got hit much harder - percentage wise - than any other demographic during the recession. But that's another topic.
I suppose my point is this nation doesn't respect thinkers. We only see education as a tool used for job employment. Because we're 'Murica. And nothing is more important than money and buying shit.
In Europe there are fewer college grads, but I find the American dream more alive there than here. A picture was posted the other day of a man who came from a family of janitors. He was the first in his family to go to college. He said he was proof the American dream was still alive.
In most European nations you don't have DeVrys. College isn't some drunken beer fest and endless sporting event to spectate. If you have good grades the state will pay for you to go to school. All you need is good grades in most nations. That's it. And for the most part the corporate world stays out of it.
Even in our "higher academic" realms where education in the sciences are still going strong, schools are selling off the results of studies, patents on inventions that were done by the labor of kids who are paying to attend the school to the highest bidder, so these things can be locked away by some corporation and IP law.
The school system in this nation has been made to serve the interests of business first and foremost and almost exclusively. And the american people can't wait for it to do so even more. They are salivating to kick the shit out of those "faggot" art majors, those "sissy" English majors, those "useless" philosophers, or theoretical scientists even. Because they have the limited vision to see what these people can offer society.
And as we become a nation obsessed with vocation as a means to endless consumption, we find ourselves in a race to the bottom as corporations decide that regardless of how large our loans are (which are nothing more than externalized job training we paid for ourselves) we're too expensive. And now we're meant to compete at the scab wages of nations that haven't figured out that kissing in public isn't a travesty worthy of a stoning.
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