Thread: Bin Laden Dead
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Re: Bin Laden Dead
Old 05-04-2011, 06:56 PM   #50
Vampyr
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Default Re: Bin Laden Dead

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Originally Posted by Professor S View Post
You are both thinking about this from the prism that education must be centrally controlled.

The internet has allowed amazing things to be done with home schooling and community schooling. Giant schools that treat students like cattle are part of the issue.

Part of the solution also needs to be removing the stigma that surround vocational school. College really isn't for everyone. Actually, since most people go to college and treat it like a vocational school, I'd say its not for MOST people.

Our entire educational system is locked in old thinking and idealistic fantasy, not pragmatism or results.
I'm not saying it must be centrally controlled, I'm just having trouble with the logistics of making sure every child is able to get to school. Right now having a government funded and controlled school system means they can track who is and who isn't coming to school, and go after parents who aren't sending their kids to school. Requiring kids to go to the district that they live in means every kid is guaranteed to have transportation.

If you let parents and kids choose which school to go to, the good schools would be crowded and children with parents who didn't care or don't have the means to send them to the better school would be unfairly left out.

I don't think home schooling is really a great option. School is as much about the social growth of people as it is the academic growth, and if home schooling was too acceptable and a lot of people were doing it I think you would also see a lot of slacker parents who don't teach their kids everything they need to know.

As for vocational schools, yeah. College isn't for everyone. Personally I think college is scam that we all pay too much money for. Most degrees aren't worth anything. Teens are indoctrinated into the mindset that they should major in something they "love" with no regard for their future.

You're paying a crap ton of money to a University so that you can ultimately get a degree that is supposed to help you get a decent job. Instead people pay Universities a crap ton of money to get a degree that won't help them with much of anything, and once they graduate they don't really know what to do with themselves because the only thing they've done their whole lives is go back to school. So what do they do? "Eh, I guess I'll just go for my Masters." This decision is made with seemingly no forethought put into what good that masters degree will actually do them in the long run. Instead they sink further and further into debt because of how easy it is to get loans to pay for something so expensive you'll be working for decades to pay it off.

College has me pretty jaded. I feel extremely fortunate that I got a scholarship and majored in something that allowed me to get a good job. I have a friend who was majoring in the same thing I was, dropped out after 2 years in, and is now making as much money as I do doing the same job I do. If I had actually payed for my college I'd be even more annoyed than I am at the idea I potentially wasted 4 years doing homework.

I think we should tell teens and future college students to major in something they -like-, not necessarily love, that has real world applications.

If you absolutely adore philosophy and can't imagine a life where you don't "do" philosophy, that's fine. Go to the library and check out books on philosophy. Read and study philosophy to your hearts desire. You don't need to pay a University an insane amount of money so that you can be bored in a classroom while a professor who doesn't really care about teaching drones on word-for-word on the same things you could have just read yourself.
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