Posted on 09/26/2008 4:27:48 PM PDT by thinkingIsPresuppositional
Higher (Priced) Education
By Burt Prelutsky
Oscar Wilde once described a cynic as a man who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. It makes me wonder, were he alive today, if he would characterize us as a country of cynics or merely dismiss us as a nation of fools.
I mean, how is it that Americans who lived hardscrabble lives 150 years ago could read, write, do math problems, and quote at length from Shakespeare and the Bible, while today, in spite of “Sesame Street,” pre-school, Operation Head Start, computers, and mind-numbing hours of homework, millions of youngsters entering college can do none of those things?
It seems obvious to me that our education system, which costs us billions and billions of dollars, is a wreck. While not all of it is the fault of the teachers unions, affirmative action, bi-lingual education, and the emphasis on promoting self-esteem in the youngsters, a lot of it is. But if there was any one thing I would change tomorrow, it’s the loony notion that everyone should get a college degree.
It’s as if the nation’s water supply had been tampered with by one of those fairy tale witches who was always up to no good, poisoning apples, putting people into comas, locking them up in towers, and placing curses on newborn babies. One day, it seems, everybody in America woke up convinced that he or she was the parent of a young scholar. No matter what sacrifice they had to make for their budding Albert Einstein or Marie Curie, they would see to it that their young sprouts made it safely through the groves of academe.
As a result, the biggest con game, the slickest racket, in America is the co-called college education.
Now, please understand, I have nothing against education. My only objection is the way the whole thing works. Why, for instance, do you think students are required to devote four years to undergraduate studies? It’s simply because that’s how the colleges make their money. It’s like the movies. They don’t make their profit selling you a ticket, they clean up at the concession stand selling you popcorn and over-priced candy and sodas.
What they claim is that they want to turn out well-rounded individuals, but that is such an obvious lie, it’s a wonder that anyone believes it for a second. Hardly anyone in America has been all that well-rounded since Thomas Jefferson passed away. Aside from learning how to drink themselves into a stupor and smooth-talk members of the opposite sex, those first four years have no other purpose than to drain off thousands of dollars from mom and dad in order to pay exorbitant salaries to administrators, professors, and a gaggle of athletic coaches.
There is a solution to this madness, but it would require that we quit pretending that anyone should be devoting four years to listening to lazy left-wing professors nattering on about 20th century comic books, 19th century French poetry, the movies of Sam Fuller, the scribbling of Noam Chomsky, or the sex life of Henry Miller.
What I propose is that they turn colleges and universities into libraries, zoos, hospitals or, for all I care, parking lots or low-income housing. And in place of these ivory towers, I would institute an assortment of trade schools. But not just those traditional trade schools where high school graduates learn to be mechanics, plumbers, and carpenters, but trade schools for lawyers, doctors, accountants and architects.
Frankly, I don’t care if my doctor has ever read Baudelaire or my accountant can tell a Manet from a Monet, not that they could even if they’d wasted four years of their lives as undergrads. Thanks to computers and the local library, anybody can bone up on just about anything he’s interested in, and it doesn’t cost upwards of $100,000 to do it.
My system is far more efficient than what we have today, plus parents wouldn’t have to mortgage their homes just so Johnny and Susie can attend a school that has ivy on its walls or a Rose Bowl-bound football team.
In time, I believe, we could learn to accept that what we now refer to as a college education is just a pastime, except, of course, when it’s really just a joke.
I will put your family in my prayers. And, it will work out. BTW my degree was in exercise physiology, lots of folks with that go into physical therapy (more school) which used to be (and probably still is) a very good career.
susie
“Spoken like an illustration of what this article is all about.”
I understand what you mean, and I too wish there were such a thing as a true liberal education offered in our universities. But as pragmatic and instrumental as the universities are made out to be by the defenders of dead white males, in my opnion we aren’t teaching simple disciplines like economics, either. Many professors, when entering upon value-theory, embrace silly, abstract notions of “social justice” and the like. If they were to take their disciplines seriously, and closely study their own litertary tradition, they’d be less likely to make such unfounded claims.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the modern professor’s instincts are the worst of both worlds. They’d be likely to embrace Wilde’s sentiments, but not because they rely on the wisdom of the ages, rather because of some (fallacious) higher notions materialism. Simultaneously, their love of transcendent truths falls apart when it comes to disciplines like philosophy, since they drag all the beautiful systems of the past through the mud of their historicism and their post-structuralism.
I consider myself fluent in the big ideas of Western culture, and as such am liable to laugh along with Wilde at cynics who bury their head in the sand and complain of a lack of sunlight. However, people who understand economic theory are not cynics. It is perfectly easy to keep discplines seperate from one another. There is more than one type of value, and Wilde’s “value” should not be used to dimish the “value” of economic man, in my opinion.
It was PLU.
“It’s virtually impossible to become competent in technical disciplines such as mathematics, science, engineering, and medicine without rigorous university training.”
The author’s point is that you should be able to get all of that technical training at a school that doesn’t require all the humanities courses to ‘round you out’ as a human being.
As a new lawyer, I’m taking a pay cut from when I was teaching elementary school.
I’m glad you’re not a buggywhip salesman. That might be a growth industry though when the Obama economic and energy policies are enacted.
Libs are constantly making HUGE assumptions (stereotypes, whatever), based on my education, and do so to their own detriment. I know how they think, manipulate, because I, too, have been trained likewise.
That's why I'm enjoying the Palin ascendancy so much, like a great practical joke on the ulimate exploiters of women - leftists. They exploit every unborn female child (and of course the baby boys, too), by making sure as many get aborted as possible and women have to live with the consequences of their choice (e.g., posttraumatic stress, fertility issues, etc.); and on and on. She's an unexploited woman, free and happy - what a black eye to NOW-types.
College was "educational" for me, just as a trip to another culture might be; you better understand, say, the French or the Chinese, by visiting their native land. I understand the Leftists, the Progressives, the Marxists, the Statists, because I have spent years in their radicalization centers (Alinsky's view of college, to borrow an idea from Rules for Radicals, the H. Rodham and B. Obama mentor). My true education was not in the sense of being brainwashed with my classmates; I had to go to outside sources for my true education.
Hey, and someone ought to mention how USELESS that 3rd year of law school is - you know, that cash cow for the universities to which the law school is attached. What a scam!
Do tell, that’s what occurred to me without it ever being spelled out.
Both health care and higher education are somehow considered too sacred to be left to the market.
As a result both industries are perverted and inflated. It has been pointed out that technological advancement in just about every industry except medicine has resulted in superior products and ever-declining prices.
As for education, well, for every dollar the taxpayer kicks in, the tuition seemingly goes up $1.25. If government got out of the student loan business entirely you’d see a sea change alright. I’ve lost count of the various expert estimates of how much cheaper a credit-hour would become under a lean, mean competitive system of undergraduate commuter-based higher education without all the obscene overhead of tenured professors, ivy-covered facilities, dorms and sports teams. In and around my neighborhood in Arlington, VA there are half a dozen small schools and satellite campuses occupying several floors in various office buildings. Unfortunately outfits like Strayer University are still a damn ripoff costwise.
I’ve heard only occasional rumblings at how this accrediting mafia works.
That if the system were opened up and standardized we could have small commuter campuses all over the land with extremely low credit-hour costs and no silly overhead.
While I've known some great individuals and fine engineers who had Ph.Ds, a lot of them are frustrated academics or otherwise saddled with atitude problems that make them difficult to work with or get any useful results out of. I heard that during the defense turn down of the early 90’s (it started with Bush-I who recognized that the country didn't need the same defense posture post-cold war) a lot of resumes suddenly shed Ph.Ds.
BJ?
I just left the ELCA. The fact that it was PLU explains a lot. I think it is sad that these schools lead parents to believe their kids are getting a good Christian education and then they turn them into Marxists.
Tell me about the Concordias.
The Christian college that two of my kids have attended is Bryan College in Dayton, TN. My daughter graduated in 2006 and my son is currently a sophomore. They are truly a Christian college and teach all the courses from a Biblical worldview and with a goal of reaching the culture. They don't isolate themselves from the world, but seek to understand and engage the culture. We have been very pleased because while we are Christian homeschoolers, we have never been isolationist. Bryan has been a very good fit for out kids.
Thank you for the info. My granddaughter’s husband is attending Lutheran seminary at St. Louis, MO,. He finished up at Concordia last spring.
“It’s virtually impossible to become competent in technical disciplines such as mathematics, science, engineering, and medicine without rigorous university training.”
As a student who will be graduating with a BS in mathematics in December, and who has already been accepted to my university’s doctoral program, I can say that that’s bulls**t.
Yes, the university instruction is necessary, but ONLY in the particular field of study.
Try and find an undergraduate program of study in mathematics at any university in the nation that only involves math classes. That course of study would only last about two years (maybe more if the student hadn’t started calculus in high school). The rest of the courses I’ve had to take, with the exception of two elective philosophy courses (symbolic logic and metaphysics) had absolutely no effect whatsoever on my mathematical competence.
The OP is correct. The University model is a scam. It forces students who are seeking what is essentially vocational education to take useless filler crap courses in order to pad the pockets of the professors who teach bulls**t.
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