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.
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