A Little Education
“We have no manufacturing industry left in this country—everything is IT or service based. Therefore, everyone is pushed into college, whether they have any interest in academics or not. So, we have classrooms full of people who don’t really WANT to be there. The have no choice, though, because there are no sustaining jobs for high school graduates anymore.”
I can’t say that being “pushed” into college was a bad thing, but I’ve never really liked school, at least as an institution. After high school, I wished I was done, but that’s not how it works. When society tells you to go to school, you listen, because everything is now based on achievement. If Emily, a high school graduate, competes for a job with a clone of herself who has a bachelors degree [in anything], her clone will win the job.
Lack of government funding in higher education is at an all time low, and because they aren’t supported, colleges are hiking up tuition costs and fees. When education-starved Americans play the blame game, universities are immediately and unfairly the target of criticism for inaccessible educations. The true finks are the fat cats in Washington, denying every single American citizen an inexpensive education that will naturally better the country. But do they want the country to be better? Are we supposed to be educated? United States test scores, when compared to those of the rest of the world, would suggest that we should not be educated; or, rather, that we simply aren’t educated—at least not sufficiently. What should the priority of the United States be? Fighting an imaginary war on terror, or properly educating its citizens?
3 years ago • Notes