It would be terribly inefficient to teach kids only what they like. How would a school be able to accomodate that? Everyone signs up for bowling, cooking, and band. Maybe a few go-getters take a foreign language or English. A smaller number sign up for chemistry. No one signs up for calculus. Do you just let the calculus teacher go? Give him a section of bowling class to teach? How is a school supposed to prepare who to hire, if the students are dictating their own curricula and interests switch up year to year?
Even in college kids have to take required coursework. I wouldn’t have signed up to take statistics if I had had my druthers. Not because I’m math-phobic, but because the professor who taught it had a bad reputation. And that would have been a damn shame. I would not have the job I have now if I had not taken statistics.
I know it sounds cool to give kids freedom and choice, but if there’s one thing school teaches, it’s that life ain’t Burger Kinger. You can’t always have it your way. Sometimes you have to do stuff you don’t want to. Maybe it’s all useless, but wouldn’t you rather learn TOO much rather than cutting yourself at the knees based on immature decision-making?
For what it’s worth, I did say somewhere above that I was all for exposing kids to lots of different subjects they could choose to explore or not, so long as they do indeed get to have that choice once the introduction’s over.
It’s the “You’re going to take this course whether you like it or not, for as long as we tell you to take it, and all the while, you’re going to be punished if you avoid demonstrating interest in it or try to spend your time on other things instead” model which I don’t care for.
Call it scorched-earth, but if there’s really no one who wants to learn calculus, then there’s really no need to have a calculus teacher, anymore than you’d have a Portuguese teacher if no one wanted to learn Portuguese…
I’ll also note that interest levels are not entirely unpredictable from term to term; do schools currently worry about the possibility that some semester, everyone will choose to study Spanish and no one will choose to study French?
Still, yes, there would likely need to be a shift in how we structure teacher employment. However we decide to manage the financial compensation of the teachers, though, I hardly see why it should impinge on what we make the students do.
Sure. There are also a vast number of courses you did deliberately choose not to take, mind you. And there are a number of jobs which you could have been prepared for if only you had chosen to take those courses. Shall we lament that we didn’t force you to take all those courses as well?
Yes, this is the “The goal of school isn’t actually to educate you in the subjects of your courses, in keeping with your desire to be educated in those subjects; the goal of school is to demonstrate how life sucks and you have to suck it up, to prepare you for the fact that life sucks and you have to suck it up” school of thought which is sometimes put forth. If that’s really the goal, everything makes sense, though even that goal could be carried out more effectively if we really committed to it. I am only speaking currently for how I think education should work, not how I think soul-callousing should be carried out.
Again, I think it’s too glib to simply argue “More education better. More education better! You’re not against education, are you?”.
Why not have everyone get Masters degrees? Why not have everyone be a double major in Math and History? Why not have everyone learn German, French, and Kannada?
Well, not everyone wants a Masters, not everyone wants to double-major in Math and History, and very few people want to learn Kannada. And, by and large, we respect those decisions. That’s the kind of respect I advocate generalizing.
This is such a ridiculous statistic. If I took the average cost of attending public university (let alone private, which is much higher), and took that money and invested it when I was 22 years old and let it sit for 55 years at 5% interest I’d have over a million dollars.
Which isn’t to say that for some, college is a financial net gain, but for many it’s probably a misuse of finances.
That’s pretty obvious. But might it be that you didn’t put the effort in to get something from them?
A topic is of no interest to you because you choose not to be interested in it. Some topics might be too hard to be worth the effort, and some might have to be sidelined due to lack of time, but almost everything is of interest.
I can’t imagine how a university taught you how not to learn. You have a good amount of freedom to take classes which interest you, and if you are in a decent university you will have at least some professors who love their subjects - especially when you get past the 100 level classes. And you have electives. My daughter, who was a joint psych/economics major, took a class in cuneiform in college because she wanted to. I bet you had similar opportunities. if not that weird.
I’m curious - are you spending your free time learning something now? Not work related, I mean. I’m reading Aristotle, not because I have to but because I want to. I’m also working on learning something about classical music, despite my tin ear.
You are not considering the value of a higher living standard over the years from attending college. If someone attending college chose to live the life as someone not, and saved the difference between their income and their reduced expenses, they’d have a lot more than a million bucks stored up.
And you have to consider that the unemployment rate for college graduates is much lower than for non-college graduates.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say there’s no road to a net financial benefit from a college degree.
But, “oooh, look at the shiny million buckaroos!” is not an honest way to tout the benefits of a higher education.
I know plenty of people who, for example, got undergraduate degrees, found jobs paying $13-15 an hour with benefits, and struggle to scrape by in an apartment with friends and no car, just paying their rent/utilities/food and loans, while their co-workers without degrees have no student loans, didn’t drop 10s of thousands of dollars on a college education, and have a four year head start in full-time earning.
Using that relatively modest jump in average income over a lifetime as a carrot to convince people to attend university is wrong, IMHO.
I’d love to know how someone came up with that statistic in the first place. It seems like it’d be next to impossible to calculate.
But it also seems likely that the income gap between high school grads and college grads is going to shrink greatly in the next few decades. A million plumbers can’t be wrong.
Not at all. When I graduated college with an IT degree in 2003, the tech sector had just imploded on itself. Companies across the country were cutting IT jobs. I ended up going back to school and I became a librarian instead. I like my choice, but considering the education required for my job, I am not exactly being paid an equivalent amount of cash.
On the other hand, one of my best friends skipped college altogether and went into the construction. With zero college education (and thus, no debts), he has amassed a considerable balance sheet that I’m a tad jealous of.
Every person I went to college with has a similar story and it’ll catch up to us soon enough.
Ah, alright. It wasn’t that I had reason to doubt your claim; I just wasn’t sure how to read your tone, since I guess I only ever read “A million ____s can’t be wrong” sarcastically.
I was nitpicking your rebuttal. This is a much better argument - if you expect to make more out of college, you should major in something likely to make you more. You’d probably do better as a plumber than going into publishing. However, most people without any college don’t do as well as plumbers. The increase in earnings happens on the average, but who is average?
Student loans can pay for an MFA, or they can pay for law school. But I can imagine people far happier as a poor MFA than as a well-off lawyer.
I don’t think this argument holds water.
IT imploded in 2003, and a lot of people who quit college to work for startups found themselves on the street. The construction industry imploded in 2008. A lot of people making big bucks in the housing bubble found themselves on the street.
My neighbor in NJ’s brother ran a construction company - and he went bankrupt at regular intervals in the '90s.
People really good at what they do often manage to survive - with a bit of luck. The people in a field because of some ads or articles saying “sprocket maker are making big bucks - become a sprocket maker” usually are the ones who suffer when the sprocket industry goes tits up.
This example brings up my struggle with whether to say I “use” certain things or not in my present career. For the record, I work in marketing.
One the one hand, I don’t ever have to factor that polynomial or anything like it. Nor do I have to do complex statistics or solve any calculus problems. On the other hand, I work with the results of those calculations daily, even though they have been performed by others.
Other departments and vendors actually do the calculations. However, even though I don’t need the ability to perform the calculations, I do need need to understand the basics of how those calculations were performed and what they mean. For example, I have no need to actually calculate statistical significance, rate of increase, etc. but I darned well need to understand the results. Learning to perform the calculations gave me that understanding.
Even the classes I don’t use in my job are useful in my life. If I hadn’t taken them, I wonder how easy it would be for me to fall for claims that the LHC will destroy the world, that vaccinations cause autism, that we can’t have evolved from apes because apes are still around… oh hell with it, the fact is that life is just more *fun *with some knowledge of music, art, biology, etc. These days, the classes I most wish I’d paid more attention to are some of the classes I don’t use in my job. It’s not like my job is all there is to me or my life.
Employers like graduates in certain fields such as computer science. They treat a liberal arts degree about the same as a high school diploma except for occupations such as teaching. Also, education is actually a negative for probably most jobs since it makes one overqualified from the view of the employer for these jobs. Many employers don’t have a degree and don’t like college grads.
All the school does is provide a venue and some resources for learning. It’s not their job to make you take advantage of it.
It’s like people who complain about college just being a 4 year beer-pong party. No one held a gun to your head and made you not spend your Friday nights in the library.
