By Professor
Doom
As usual, I get a massive spike of hits to
my blog around this time of year, as students, failing in college, query the
mighty Google what to do about it. Thus my post on failing in college is now my
most popular post. Several of my posts have far more hits in a single day by a
factor of 20, but the steady hits to my Failing in College? post have relentlessly made it the
most popular, even though, I suspect, the majority of my regular readers are
not students that are currently failing college.
Across the country, millions of people are
enrolled in college, confident that a degree, any degree, is the magic ticket
to wealthy life. A degree can certainly lead to a better life, but the reality
is that an education, not a slip of paper, is far more likely to lead to
fulfillment than any document, no matter
how gloriously embossed.
Because of the student loan scam, most
colleges accept anyone, no matter how extensive the student’s track record of
academic failure, no matter if the student is clearly just another Pell runner. Instead of making progress toward
that degree, they fail. Oh, the students bumble around in psych and Gender
Studies courses for a while, and score easy A’s there, but when it comes time
for the courses that actually lead to a degree? Failure…and the poor students
don’t know what’s being done to them.
I’m the only one of my friends to make it out of [community college]. We
all took courses, but when we transferred, found out that nothing we took really
prepared us for [university]. There
was you, and [one of the few legit teachers left], but everything else was a
waste of time. My friends all just went back, but I managed to get by.
--I recognized a student from a
questionable school I worked at a number of years earlier, and congratulated
him on making his escape. He knew what I meant by saying “escape”, and
responded as above. Emphasis added.
A recent encounter with a former student
reminded me of what I really do in my job: prepare students for more. For
example, the reason why we “force” students to have basic reading and writing
skills as freshmen? So that we know they’re prepared for addressing the more challenging, and relevant, pieces
of literature humanity has produced. Students complain about the courses they
are forced to take, and administrators complain about offering such courses, because
neither knows enough about education to understand why they’re “cruelly” forced
to take them. Why not just put them directly in Brain Surgery 101? That sounds
far more useful, after all.
A common complaint about higher education
is how useless so much of it is, especially liberal arts. Perhaps so, but
obscure topics of higher education were never about usefulness. Yes, some
topics may be useful, but that was never the point.
Take, for example, philosophy, the
discipline most vociferously censured as being the most fundamentally useless
of all courses. In times past, logic used to be taught as philosophy (it still
is, I admit, but nowhere near as commonly as it used to be). Logic prepares students to understand
rational thinking, all but necessary to truly comprehend the thoughts of our
greatest philosophers.
Even without logic, of what usefulness to
the real world is there to studying the thoughts of Plato, Socrates, and
Nietzsche? I can only respond with “why must it be useful to the real world?”
However, for a human being that is pursuing the big questions of reality, of
consciousness, studying the thoughts of the greatest minds that have devoted themselves to such topics does,
at the least, prepare the student to
construct answers of his own to the various big questions of “why?”
“Read a book!”
--common retort to an excessive
display of ignorance
Preparation.
That’s the purpose of higher education, but why do we send our young to massive
institutions, soak up around 6 years of their lives, and charge them a
grotesque fortune for the “privilege”? Honestly, the vast bulk of knowledge is
in books, or on the internet, and neither books nor internet access cost all
that much, especially if you stick to textbooks that are a few years old (and
thus obsolete, thanks to the textbook scam).
“Hey, can you show me how to modify this file?”
--I’m no computer whiz, and learning computer
tasks that I’ve never done before will either take an hour of frustration on my
part as I peruse technical manuals…or I can just ask someone that knows.
The reason why university education came
about is fairly simple: if you want to learn something, the easiest, fastest,
way to do it is to ask someone who knows how to do it show you. So, if you want
to know things, you also want to be near people that know things. People that know
things tend to want to know more things, and so such people tended to form
groups.
And that’s all a university used to be: a
collection of scholars, people that know things, in the same area.
But back to the point, the fast way to
learn is to have someone show you. So, ideally, higher education should be
about preparation, and while such preparation can totally come from books, it’s
just quicker if you have a teacher, especially a personal teacher, to show and
guide you in the things you want and need to know.
Now, Educationists have taken over higher
education, seeking not knowledge, but expansion. The results have been
disastrous for both the what and the why of education.
Instead of preparation, our campuses are
filled with ridiculous coursework that, rather than prepare students,
wastes their time and their (or, more accurately, the taxpayers’) money.
Preparation, what used to be a goal of
accreditation, has
literally vanished from accreditation requirements, which is why UNC could run
fake “paper courses” for a generation with no complaint from accreditation, and
why they won’t lose accreditation for such shenanigans.
Now our universities are loaded down with
bogus courses only marginally better at best than any UNC paper course. Rather
than waste time and money on bogus courses, the student wishing an education
would be better off just reading random books.
Instead of learning from a teacher, now
our students are loaded into massive, overflowing classrooms, it’s all but impossible
to get a degree without having at least a few classes “taught” by one
instructor, alongside dozens, even hundreds of students…and many campuses are
building (or already have) lecture halls that can “accommodate” 1,000 students
or more. A student can gain nothing from a teacher in this manner; all that can
happen is the student sits with the crowd, while the teacher reads a very thin PowerPoint
synopsis of the course material.
Rather than waste time and money on
oversize courses where the teacher is irrelevant, the student wishing an
education would be better off just reading the textbook on his own time.
Ultimately, higher education today is, for
many students, devoid of education: they are prepared for nothing despite the
shiny degree, which is why there are millions of degree holding waiters
and waitresses (I
grant that the economy is part of that, but many people with college degrees
have no skills, academic or otherwise, from a higher education system that,
according to educationists, is working exactly as intended).
If you have a goal, and wish to be
prepared to reach it, realize an education is the best way to become prepared.
The quickest way to getting an education (and I make no claim becoming educated
is a quick endeavor!) is through personal teachers. Gentle reader, please
realize that higher education today offers very little for most people for
achieving any goal whatsoever.
If you don’t have a goal, stay away from
today’s higher education system until you know what you’re looking for, as it’s
long forgotten the what and the why of an education. Instead, our higher
education system takes people without goals, drains them of their wealth and
youth, and leaves them with nothing but age and debt.
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