There is one very simple truth about education that we somehow manage to overlook while drowning ourselves in tuition bills, student loans, and academic nonsense dressed up like enlightenment.
First, people need to read, write, speak clearly, and understand their own language. Radical stuff, I know. That should be accomplished during the first twelve years of school, assuming the system is doing something besides producing graduates who need spellcheck to order lunch.
After that, education should serve two basic purposes: helping people compete in the job market and helping them earn a living. That is not complicated. Education should put skills in the brain and money in the pocket. Everything else should at least have the decency to admit it is a hobby with a campus bookstore.
Real education means useful training. Science. Engineering. Computers. Medicine. Law. Government. Business. Skilled trades. These are the fields that keep civilization from collapsing into a committee meeting run by people with sociology degrees.
And no, I am not throwing the arts into the dumpster. We need music, films, theater, design, and entertainment. People value those things, and talented artists can actually earn a living when they produce something people want. Imagine that. A marketable skill. What a scandal.
But then we get to the academic swamp: gender studies, feminist theory, queer theory, social deconstruction, ethnic grievance studies, identity politics, activism seminars, and all the other expensive exercises in professional complaining. Much of this is not education. It is ideological cosplay with a tuition invoice.
There is no sane reason taxpayers should subsidize degrees that produce no useful skill, no measurable productivity, and no obvious path to employment beyond teaching the same material to the next batch of paying victims. It is a beautiful pyramid scheme with better landscaping.
Meanwhile, we desperately need plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, aviation workers, welders, machinists, medical technicians, and people who can actually fix, build, operate, and maintain the world. These are not fallback careers. These are civilization careers. When your toilet explodes, you do not call a professor of social deconstruction. You call a plumber, and you pray he answers.
We need to stop pretending every course with a title and a syllabus deserves public funding. Education should be judged by whether it produces competence, productivity, and opportunity. If people want to study useless academic fluff for personal fulfillment, wonderful. Let them pay for it themselves.
Taxpayers should not be forced to finance someone’s four-year journey into theoretical resentment with a minor in unemployment.
Comments
Yes, schools mis-represent the “guarantees” upon graduation. The simple fact is that, in four years, the world (now) changes enough to make much of what they teach irrelevant.
But no, what good (!) colleges *really* teach is not just “how to learn” but “how to learn fast.” They know that students will have to adapt to the job market, and probably will do so every few years. (Plumbing materials and building codes change. A plumber who doesn’t keep up will soon be out of work.)
When I graduated, I’d learned a lot of electronics—mostly vacuum tubes—and several computer languages. But industry was moving to “solid state” (transistors then integrated circuits and finally large scale computers on silicon). In two years, none of the computer languages were still in use, and vacuum tubes were relegated to dinosaurs. (The few engineers that stuck with the old ways were out of work in less than a decade.)
So, to survive and bring home a paycheck, I learned new technologies on my own. “What languages and technologies are companies wanting?” I went and learned them.
And I got a job.
And as the market evolved over 45 years, I learned, re-learned, and re-invented myself about once a decide.
The world changes, and a good school will teach you how to adapt, how to learn, how to make yourself valuable in the marketplace.