By Professor Doom
“The computer business is exclusively the
work of school dropouts...”
--John Taylor Gatto, who then
goes on to list every single luminary in the computer business…and tells us
when each luminary dropped out.
John Taylor Gatto is, or
should be, a national treasure. He won many teaching awards, but then walked
away from the profession when he realized that teaching in the public schools
was a profession that hurts children. Most everything he wrote about concerned
public education of children, but what he has to say is often relevant to
higher education.
I’ve linked to a very brief talk of
his. It begins with the above, pointing out that the entirety of
the computer business today comes from people who dropped out of school.
I’ve discussed
before how completely bogus “computer science” degrees are in our college and
university system, and why. If you want to gain marketable, useful, computer
skills, you should run away from our rip-off accredited schools that teach
nothing (for tens of thousands of dollars a year in loans you’ll owe forever
because you won’t learn employable skills), and instead go to unaccredited
schools that teach real skills (and if you can’t get employed
after graduating from the legitimate unaccredited school, you owe nothing;
please understand that accreditation is a seal of illegitimacy nowadays).
Higher education’s
gross incompetence here is no surprise for regular readers of my blog. A
natural defense to the ineptitude of computer training would be “But computers
are evolving so fast, our huge and sluggish higher education system can’t keep
up.”
It’s a good
defense, and frankly, I believe our thousand year old system should be a little
slow to adapt to a flavor-of-the-month topic (although it sure hasn’t slowed
the embrasure of gender studies and diversity). That is not the issue here.
“When you
move to the fast food business…every founder of every fast food franchise was
[a dropout]”
Now we’re talking fast food, an
industry where high school and elementary school dropouts laid all the
foundations. Fast food, business,
hasn’t changed much at all in decades…why can’t higher education even copy the ideas of those who came before
(a core idea of the university!), and produce *someone* just as capable and
insightful as a high school dropout?
We tell our kids
to go to college to learn something to give them a better life. Our Poo Bahs in
higher education jack up tuition to astronomical heights because they insist
higher education is so valuable…but where are the empirical results?
I think education
is valuable, but I see no need to
indebt another human being forever to get it.
“Let’s get into show business…”
--Gatto,
pointing out a very lucrative career that, again, has few college graduates. Degrees in theatre, are, of course, worth nothing.
If we’re going to
charge insane amounts of money for college courses, I think it’s fair to
justify that charge.
“Ted Turner was thrown out, so guess we
can’t call him a dropout...”
It used to be
possible to be thrown out of school, but the “student as customer” foolishness
has ended that. That’s a shame, we could use a few more people as astute in
business as Ted Turner. It’s possible we should blame higher education for the
lack.
In another video, Gatto
explains how to educate a child, at least if you want a genius.
He has an
important message regarding higher education.
Gatto, to a
GM executive after GM went belly up: “What happened?”
Executive:
“Engineering, which used to be the fast track to the executive suite [i.e.,
leadership of GM]…stopped being the fast track. Finance became the fast track…”
I want to
emphasize what happened here: GM used to rule the world when it came to cars,
other countries couldn’t even come close (and other American companies could
only keep up by hiring away GM engineers). But GM changed how it got its
leaders. Instead of getting people that knew
the business to run the business, it
appointed people that knew nothing of how to build a great car, and the end
result was quite predictable: GM became a company that could not build a decent
car, much less a great car.
This is what
we’re seeing now in higher education. In times past, the leadership of a
university was drawn from the faculty of the university. In this manner, the
university was able to excel at its job. It’s why the university system became
adopted across the world as the primary method of advanced education. The American
university system today has at best a very shaky grasp on the rulership of the
higher education world. Actually, it has lost the leadership by a wide margin,
according to a senate report I’ll address soon.
What happened?
Our system of
higher education is no longer run by the people that know anything about higher
education. Instead it’s run by a demented caste of plundering sociopaths, as
I’ve documented so many times in this blog. They don’t come from the faculty
anymore. The end result has been predictable: our institutions are being
looted, and often become basket cases, paralyzed by issues that have absolutely
nothing to do with education.
Within a
generation, I can see someone walking up to a homeless man on the street,
holding a sign: “Former Tenured Faculty. Nobel Prize Winner. Will Lecture For
Food.”
When someone goes
up to the bum and asks “What happened?” we all know what the answer will be. We
know it because of John Taylor
Gatto, and I encourage the gentle reader to watch many of his
videos and read his works, especially if considering putting a child into the
public education system.
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