But do the people running the schools have a vested interest in dribbling out the knowledge as slowly as possible and wasting time on irrelevant junk so they can make more MONEY.
Why don’t we have a National Recommended Reading List?
What does anyone need with Liberal Arts courses to get a degree in Electrical Engineering and they expect you to pay just as much for each LA course. And if you try to take those courses at a less expensive school they won’t let you transfer the credit.
But if all you want is the knowledge then:
Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics (2006) by Stan Gibilisco
20 years ago that Everycircuit app could not have existed, but the knowledge you get from using it did.
The problem is that school has turned into a scam and this technology can be used to blow away the schools.
This video series is better than the economics courses I took in college:
We could distribute a lot more relevant knowledge a lot faster if we really wanted to. But do all of the people with college degrees want high school graduates to know more than most college graduates produced more than 5 years ago?
Nonsense, I apprenticed in a machine shop, I didn’t get any ‘formal education’ for the first 2 years, then I got out of high school and took some metal tech as a secondary set of classes to my regular majors [political science and sociology, and later I got accounting when I did the whole adult re-education thang.] So for my primary means of making money I barely got any ‘formal education’ [well I take that back, drafting and blueprint were taught in High School, and I took it because I always liked art. I figured it would help me with geometry - and I still say I don’t need to prove any damned thing, they already did it a few hundred years ago. I just need to know how to put it into use.]
It used to be that businesses would send recruiters to colleges and you would graduate into a job that you would keep for decades until retirement. You used to walk out of high school with the equivalent to today’s liberal arts education. Now you are lucky to walk out of high school able to read, write and do basic math, what used to be a 6th grade education.
Something is seriously fucked up in the educational system. We are sqiftly turning into Idiocracy.
Having read a book does not mean you have knowledge. Knowledge means reading and comprehending said book, and to be sure you comprehend it you need to be tested on what you think you learned.
If someone claims he knows EE, and hands me a diploma from a good college and a transcript with a good GPA, I’ll believe him - though I’ll know he needs more training in applying what he learned in the real world.
If someone claims he knows EE and tells me he has read some books and looked at some YouTube videos - nope. I’d have to test him extensively, which probably isn’t worth the time.
Even if you read for pure knowledge., knowing you’ll be tested on it helps it to sink in.
I agreee with you about EE, or really any other highly technical subject. While it’s possible to be self-taught, it can be hard to figure out where a self-taught person’s knowledge gaps are.
But thinking about it, if a guy came in to my office for an interview and he didn’t have a degree in EE but he had every Ham radio certification there is, plus he could show me some of the circuits he’s designed and some of the equipment he’s built, I’d at least consider him - not for a job that requires a professional engineer, but perhaps for a QA or a bench tech or for some other lower-level technical skill for which you might otherwise hire a 2-year diploma grad in engineering technology.
But if I needed someone for a job that would normally go to a liberal arts grad, such as a technical writer or an office manager, I think I could evaluate that person quite reasonably by just asking them to write a 2-page essay. In my experience, there are a lot of college grads who couldn’t put two pages together into a coherent, well formulated argument or position.
The key thing I’d want out of a liberal arts grad is not whether they are ‘well rounded’ by studying literature or Roman history, but whether they have the ability to think on their feet, come up with reasonable solutions to common problems, and communicate effectively. That’s a fairly low bar, but I’ve seen college grads who can’t jump over it.
Here in Alberta in the 1980’s, so many kids were going into college lacking the basic ability to read and write that our province instituted a ‘writing competency exam’. It was incredibly easy, in my opinion. All you had to do was write a 400 word essay on a subject of your choosing. You were allowed several spelling errors and several grammatical errors in those 400 words; the key thing we were looking for was the ability to write a few coherent paragraphs which made the point you claimed to make in the subject header. That’s it.
I was a marker for those exams, and my God many of them were atrocious. I would get submissions like the one below. Bear in mind that we’re considered to have an above-average school system, and the colleges in question are quite highly regarded.
…and so on. Four hundred words of incoherent blathering.
That’s not an exaggeration. In fact, I probably should have added a few more spelling errors to give a better sense of the quality of some of these exams.
In any event, the government decided that all college students had to take that exam when entering college. If they flunked, they had to sign up for ‘bonehead english’, then re-take the exam at the end of the course. If they still couldn’t pass, they had to repeat the course. And if by the end of their second year they still hadn’t passed the exam, they would be expelled from college until they passed.
Well, two years after the exam was introduced the province was faced with hundreds of students who were finishing their second year of college and still couldn’t pass that simple 400 word essay. So what did we do? We quietly dropped the requirement. So all those students got to continue on and graduate.
I found myself wondering how they could have possibly made it through two years of college without basic writing skills? Who was giving them passing grades?
It’s experiences like this that have made me quite cynical about the value of a general college degree.