Posted on 11/20/2023 6:16:56 AM PST by MtnClimber
Can’t resist recommending Berry College in NW GA: https://www.berry.edu/about/purpose-and-mission ... Largest campus in the world (twice the size of Manhattan iirc). Our granddaughter is a nursing student there.
I think what is being described here, and I've observed it closely for a number of years, is that today's universities have reached a sort of evolutionary dead end, maintaining the trappings but discarding the actual functions of acting as repositories of human knowledge. The question is whether the corruption within the ivory towers can survive the breakup of those towers and their forcible exposure to the real world.
Because the towers are breaking. Distance learning has made grand campuses, especially residential campuses, unsustainable. What is lost is the sense of social structure and connection derived from communal learning; what is gained is that the parasitical administrative classes may be pared back to something manageable, faculty pared back to something productive, and tenure pared back to something more practical than a socialistic sinecure tossed out like largesse from a royal parade.
This process is going to be painful because it threatens a lot of people who have benefited from the ride without helping to pull the wagon. It is also in deadly danger of centralized control by authorities over the means of communication. Government censorship will kill the product, but then it's already doing that anyway.
__”Many universities could be and should be converted to upscale retirement communities.”
An insufficient number of bathrooms and noncompliance with ADA requirements make it economically unlikely.
And many more problems.
I’ve had 3 kids recently go through the indoctrination centers of Cal State and UC. There’s a method to getting through them.
First, major in STEM and get a Bachelor of Science degree. It’s hard to make Calculus, Computer Science, Math, or Physics woke.
Second, avoid all woke classes and subjects (GEs and electives) like the plague. No sociology, gender studies, civil rights classes. Interestingly, philosophy has not yet been made woke.
Third—and this is the trickiest part—when choosing REQUIRED woke classes (US Diversity Studies, World Studies), choose classses in music or food when possible. When choosing a required ethnic studies class, go with Native Americans or Jews if offered.
Also, if a white male student, keep your head down—and be very careful with dating due to false charges of rape.
You’re welcome!
Degree procured.
ping
Says it all about modern 'education'...
How Did Higher Education Become a Cargo Cult?
Drowning in Cargo Cults
How Did Higher Education Become a Cargo Cult?
BY el gato malo, EL GATO MALO NOVEMBER 20, 2023 ECONOMICS, EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY 14 MINUTE READ
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The “cargo cult” represents an important concept and seems especially so of late. Early observations of such behavior emerged in island cultures exposed to European explorers. Ships unlike anything previously dreamed of arrived full of strange people with wondrous trade goods for exchange. Metals, mirrors, muskets, you name it. The desire for these advanced goods was strong and so the locals traded for them with gusto. Then, at some point, the newcomers left.
The locals wanted more trade and to attempt to foster it, many adopted rituals whereby they would create what essentially amounted to effigies of ships and float them on the sea in hope that this would make the trade goods come once more.
Astonishingly, examples of such practices remain, even today.
In essence, this practice is a category error of mistaking the surface marker or seeming of a thing for the thing itself and before anyone gets too supercilious and starts laughing up their sleeves about “those poor ignorant savages and their imaginary landing strips to which no planes will ever come.”
Let me first caution that this is not only one of the most human of phenomena, but also one of the most prolific. It’s absolutely fricking everywhere and being an “educated modern person” is zero defense against it and may well increase one’s overall vulnerability especially given, as I will begin to explore below, the inevitable effect it has on issues like higher education. It’s a model of the world worth considering.
Cargo cult thinking has become endemic in the ideas of so-called “modern” government and mistaking the signifier of a thing for the thing itself is a very dangerous and expensive proposition when you can distort markets by throwing trillions of dollars at them. At least the Bislama torch brigade is not using up a whole lot of resources or causing lasting or even lifelong harm through its misapprehension and malpractice, because let me tell you mis amigos, we here in the US most certainly are.
Consider the 2008 financial crisis, a crisis caused by the mandating (and federal guaranteeing) of loans to the extremely uncreditworthy as though they were prime credits. Pretty much anyone can tell you that that never ends well. It’s not exactly subtle but it was altogether ignored because there was a cargo cult outbreak underway.
The cult was this: middle class people own homes. Therefore, if we enable these lower-class people to own homes, they will be elevated to become middle class. “Home ownership is the path to a middle-class life” was the mantra of the day. But, as many (including me) warned at the time and as events clearly showed: this is obviously, painfully, catastrophically wrong.
The home does not make you middle class. It’s something you can successfully acquire and pay for once you have met a set of other criteria like stability, income, etc. that have made you middle class. The home is predominantly an effect, not a cause.
If you do not have the income or the stability and general creditworthiness, suddenly having a home and a huge pile of debt associated with it does not elevate you, it chokes you. At some point, you cannot pay. It can drive you into bankruptcy, wreck your life, your finances, and set you back decades in terms of the quest for financial independence and stability. You mistook a marker of a certain sort of person for meaning that you would be that sort of person if you possessed the marker, and that sort of mistake can cost dear. Obvious instances abound.
There is no surer way to fail to become a rich person than aping the expenditures of rich people at a time when you cannot afford to.
Buying a Ferrari with a $400k car loan is not the path to prosperity.
Neither is eating at places you can’t afford or taking posh vacations. These may make you look like a rich person to an uninformed observer, but they are, in actuality, poverty traps, markers mistaken for meaning.
Excerpted:
https://brownstone.org/articles/drowning-in-cargo-cults/
Why would you want to try?
There are some older adults like myself, who may have thought about going back to college now instead of when they were young. It looks like now would be a better time to just save your money & forget it. If you have any money, that is. You folks probably already got a better education at your high school “back in the day” than you could hope for at a college nowadays. By the way, I am not including ALL colleges in this statement, but many of the better known schools.
Bfl
SHOULD we?
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