The Irrelevancy Of Higher Education

[jts]

Perfesser M. T. Head taught filosofy at Ivory Tower University. His favorite student was Stu Pid. Under the tutorship of perf. M. T. Head, Stu Pid learned the following items in filosofy:

metaphysics: reality is not real

epistemology: we can't know anything

ethics: there are no values

Based on the above listed items, Stu Pid was given a Ph. D. in filosofy. In the process of getting his doctorate degree in filosofy, he spent some of the best years of his life and some tens of thousands of dollars of borrowed money that he had to pay back with interest.

Unfortunately he was not able to get a job in filosofy and he didn't know anything except filosofy. He looked in the help wanted ads and he couldn't find "help wanted: filosofer". He looked in the yellow pages under filosofers. It seemed nobody had any use for a filosofer. So he remained unemployed for the rest of his life.

You think I'm making that up?

Government took over education and as a consequence education is gradually turning into shit. John Stossel did a job on how bad government controlled education is.

[anthony]

"Front-end enrolment" and the rest this smart lady points to, carries a whiff of Utopian-Progressivist entitlement. Everybody in a 'perfect' society 'deserves' the 'best education'. Contexts - like can you (your parents) afford it, are you personally interested (indeed, passionate) enough to complete tertiary education, or what are the prospects for a specific degree in the job market - are partly dropped. At its extreme, it recalls State provided education in Soviet and Socialist countries. I knew a Polish woman who found nothing odd with she and nearly all her contemporaries being permanent, 'professional scholars', going from one degree to the next, well in to their middle age. I was driven by an ex-Russian taxi driver once in Tel Aviv who had a Phd in Physics. (Back then it was strange to me, not much now).

What we have over here, is a messed-up education system that has deemed everybody previously disadvantaged an entitled candidate for a degree, irrespective of their scholastic ability and motivation - naturally largely subsidized by the State. The drop-out/failure rate is very high. At this time, some students are rioting, burning and trashing things on several campuses in protest of any random thing (pass marks are too high, we demand to be taught in our home language, not in English, free accomodation, a university statue from the "colonial era" must be torn down - etc.). The State largely abandoned Technical Colleges early on in SA's "new dispensation" - so, many skills have a shortage. Worse, two generations of youth have had removed and have surrendered their opportunities and prospects to earn a good living and find their individual interests and talents in presumably undignified "blue collar jobs"..