I loved focusing on tweets, posts, comments and emails on the show last week. It helped me bring a wide-range of original thinking to the audience & raised the level of the discussion…many thanks!
Let’s do it again! This week I want to talk about education…
It’s graduation week for many colleges–UGA’s commencement is Friday. Graduates deserve credit for investing in their futures, working hard and committing to paying for it for many years to come (kudos to parents who paid the way!) But is college for everyone?
Everyone from Bernie Sanders to Barack Obama want universal–even free–higher education…the right seems to nod to the inherent value of college as well, but is it always good? Here are some of my questions…
Studies show that college grads earn more than non-college grads, but has anyone ever studied the results if the time and money spent on college had been used in alternative investments like earning a business?
Is everyone’s highest and best use to go to college? Many smart people are creative or mechanical geniuses who might be better off–happier, wealthier, more successful and more useful–apprenticing their crafts…perhaps rather than a higher minimum wage there should be a negative wage!! Perhaps an alternative to college might be an apprenticeship through which an artisan can charge to teach an apprentice a craft! (I’m not trying to outrage anyone, just trying to think outside the box!)
Frankly, I think the greatest goals of elites pushing higher education are not the good of the student or even of society, but is really the good of the state through: indoctrination, debt slavery (both to enrich the banks & to corral the youth), uprooting young people from their families & communities, taking youth out of the workforce, directing young people into institutional careers instead of entrepreneurial ones, etc.
I’m even beginning to think we would have a more thoughtful, informed society if kids were taught how to read (that takes about 100 hours) then walked to the library every day to do what they would…literacy was higher before compulsory education, perhaps critical thinking was more acute as well–I would be surprised to learn otherwise.
So what do you think? Is University Education a universal good?
Today unlike 30 yrs past, it is nice that at least an observant parent can identify a learning problem or deficiency in their child and have it treated. Unfortunately, public schools do not have the capabilities to administer the needed curriculum to help the child. At that point, the parents must pay a private school or tutors to help the child in order for their child to compete with their peers. Unfortunately, school tax dollars do not cover low income families. In my child’s case, it was up to us to find the problem since the school would have only swept it under the rug. A healthy (and I emphasize healthy) early learning experience (k-8) is far more important than higher education.
If public education produced any products of value, no one would have to be forced to go, and no one would have to be forced to pay for it, period.
Since it’s in the news, I’d like to say that regular, sane people did not drop a-bombs on Japan. The government did that, and did not bother to consult anyone with a sound mind. I think there is something wrong with the brain of anyone who would explode something like that in a place where there are families just trying to get by in the midst of a war that is killing their economy already. How could you do that and not be a psycho?
This goes for every other tyrant that thinks he’s doing people a favor by blowing up people that are just living and don’t give a crap about some country 5000 miles away or across an ocean or whatever. We didn’t do this. Your government did this.
I knew there was some of this, but I didn’t know how widespread it was…seems the military higher-ups were universally opposed http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/atomicdec.htm
Thanks, I was taught in public school the outright lie about it’s usefulness and necessity. It’s awful that they still teach this to children.
http://www.doug-long.com/hstimson.htm
Also an interesting read….the burden on their shoulders and the evolution of new weaponry is unfathomable to me.