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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Listening to NPR as usual,

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Originally posted by Riverlove:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Listening to NPR as usual,

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That is why you fail.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Listening to NPR as usual, they had on Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor for the California Community Colleges, speaking about the Community College's strategic vision for the future.

http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2017/07/17/58009/ca-community-co
lleges-board-sets-new-goals-to-grow/

He spoke about all of the difficulties of that Community College students face: Having to work and study at the same time, the high percentage of students who drop out before completion, the lack of clear course requirements for graduation - leading to students taking too many credits (more about that in a bit*) etc.

The entire goal of this new CA Community College strategic plan was how to more efficiently feed better-trained students into the CA workplace.

This makes sense for the colleges, the students, and business in a very limited context. I believe that everyone should have a skill when leaving school, whether a trade or a profession.

However, given the clusterfuck that is our politics/ government today, it would be nice if they added one more requirement: The ability to ask insightful questions.

A course on debate, rhetoric, or logic might help. Not only might it help us be better-informed citizens, but also help us guide our personal lives better.

There was just something about the relentless focus on turning out worker-droids that I found disturbing, especially coming from a college "strategic vision". So short-sighted, can hardly be called "strategic". more like "tactical".

* One of the problems I hear about is the lack of scheduling for relevant coursework. For example, when I took chemistry, I was required to take basic chemistry (yanno, Chem 101, 102), basic Differential Equations, basic Physics, etc. all in my first year. The problem is, nowadays, Chem 101 might be available, but Math 101 might not be available until the following year; leading me to "cool my heels" by taking Sociology or some such. A lot of college students wind up needing five years to get a four-year degree because of lack of appropriate instructors.

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Originally posted by COMDAT:
Yes, now it's not easy for students: the need to pay for study and, as a consequence, job search, makes such disappointing statistics. Of course, there are problems in our educational system and they need to be solved systematically. But, all the same, it's possible and necessary to get an education in such conditions. There are resources, like https://buyessay.org/college-essay.html, that offer their services (writing an essay, article review or presentation) in order to slightly "unload" the students and focus on them in specific areas.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
If you have good reading comprehension and decent visualization skills, you can get educated ANYWHERE. Even online or from a library.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
JSF- you forgot to add:

1) To babysit junior and juniorette because mom, or mom and dad, have to work.
2) To acclimatize youngsters to a centralized authoritarian competitive environment
3) To keep "excess" workers out of the workforce

Just to get a little philosophical here, for millenia, children learned from their parents. Whether they were learning how to chip flints or make fire or plow a straight furrow or raise chicks or spin yarn or pick cotton, kids learned their survival skills from mom and dad.

It wasn't until the advent of large centralized factories, when production moved from the home/farm to the factory/city that "what to do with the working-class kids during work hours" became a problem. (The wealthy had nannies and tutors.)

Children sometimes worked in factories along with their mother or in the mines with their father; or were packed into poorhouses; or sold bits of scavenged coal, flowers, or themselves; or formed roaming gangs that engaged in pick-pocketing, smuggling, and drugs, until compulsory schooling* was introduced (USA approx 1900, *did not apply to blacks).

Taking a lesson from the "efficiencies" of the factory, schooling became more and more centralized, standardized, and regulated. Schools looked like nothing so much as a factories for producing widgets



and although modern architecture is prettier, the same idea lies behind it: process, sort, and grade as many children as possible for as little money as possible.

All of this had unintended consequences. The goal of education is no longer to "educate" - which IMHO in the broadest sense is to teach children how to learn for a lifetime - but to become "useful", "compliant", and "employable" in a competitive authoritarian society. To sit down and accept what's being said (yanno, swallow dogma and advertising equally well and without question).

Also, with a student-teacher ratio of 35 (or more) to one, and the separation of parents from their child's education, children are left to socialize each other into their own youth subculture.

Schools DO teach actual useful skills - reading, writing (sort of), and arithmetic. Schools should also be prepared to teach an actual trade or profession. But I think they waste a lot of their time teaching "scientific facts" when they should teach the scientific method, and rather than teaching algebra they should teach how to be rational (to ratio) in real life - distinguish the large from the small, the important from the trivial. And definitely focus on teaching some form of logical thinking- either rhetoric or debate would be a useful start.
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I've been thinking about the attempt to assembly-line mass produce genius. It seems to forget that genius is genius because it breaks free from existing mental equations, not because it easily conforms to them.- KIKI

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
I think it's funny that outside of some highly skilled professions, pretty much exclusively related to science and math, most people that make it all the way through college don't command much of a salary, or end up with anything that makes them even close to irreplaceable in any field. More people will end up paying off that college education 20 or 30 years after they got it than not.

Then on the flip side a lot of the people who head up large corporations in CEO type positions are college dropouts or just never went. Many successful people who started their own business also never went to college.


School for most kids is daycare and for most young adults is just killing time in a safe environment. I think it does more harm than good for a lot of people, but with no other real alternatives out there right now what are you going to do?

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
I think it's funny that outside of some highly skilled professions, pretty much exclusively related to science and math, most people that make it all the way through college don't command much of a salary, or end up with anything that makes them even close to irreplaceable in any field. More people will end up paying off that college education 20 or 30 years after they got it than not.

Then on the flip side a lot of the people who head up large corporations in CEO type positions are college dropouts or just never went. Many successful people who started their own business also never went to college.

School for most kids is daycare and for most young adults is just killing time in a safe environment. I think it does more harm than good for a lot of people, but with no other real alternatives out there right now what are you going to do?

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I agree. JSF and I agree on "the role of education" but our emphasis is different. I see "the role of education" as primarily driven by the economic interests of the very wealthy, while JSF sees "the role of education" as being driven by politics/ ideology. In the end, I don't think you can separate politics and economics.

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Originally posted by Wishimay:
Yoda would listen to NPR. I've heard some of the best stories ever from them.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
JSF- you forgot to add:

1) To babysit junior and juniorette because mom, or mom and dad, have to work.

3) To keep "excess" workers out of the workforce

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
True. But there are SO MANY unemployed that if they couldn't keep them occupied with meaningless college courses ... or sedated with video games and social media ... there would be a revolution.

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