It's About Liberty: A Conservative Forum
Topics => The "Educators" => Topic started by: trapeze on July 06, 2011, 10:20:08 PM
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LINK (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/07/06/the_college_scam_110470.html)
"There are 80,000 bartenders in the United States with bachelor's degrees," Vedder said. He says that 17 percent of baggage porters and bellhops have a college degree, 15 percent of taxi and limo drivers. It's hard to pay off student loans with jobs like those. These days, many students graduate with big debts.
Or you could become a community organizer and if you are clean and articulate, who knows?
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Clean, articulate and don't forget the most important element ~~ Black!
This piece is either poorly written or edited into nonsense, to wit:
I spoke with Richard Vedder, author of "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much," ......
Vedder explained why that million-dollar comparison is ridiculous:
"People that go to college are different kind of people ... (more) disciplined ... smarter. They did better in high school."
They would have made more money even if they never went to college.
...
Also, lots of people not suited for higher education get pushed into it. This doesn't do them good. They feel like failures when they don't graduate. Vedder said two out of five students entering four-year programs don't have a bachelor's degree after year six.
So what is it? College-people are smarter or college-people get pushed into it?
I happen to believe that the college-track is a scam intended to defraud the public generally into believing that without the sheepskin, your employment opportunities are limited. The scam is: they are. When the courts began ruling employment testing as discriminatory, the only avenue of authentication open to employers was college degrees, which makes no sense considering the number of "Early Childhood Education" majors selling cellphone plans.
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Sophomore year a professor explained, you go to college to get and education, you go to work to make money. If you want to make a lot of money, go to work.
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A college degree is simply the entry point for access to modern day guilds. Guilds, I might add, with their own language and customs, which is why they are guilds. The legal, accounting, social work,, education, etc., professions all have their own language and customs with membership in that guild only accessible with a college degree preprogrammed for entry. Think anyone can study law on their own and become a member of the bar, as Lincoln did? Think a mathematician or a physicist can teach high school math or science? (NYC tried that under Giuliani, having people with business/real life experiences teach, but the teachers' union put the kibosh on that -- they were not members of the guild!)
When bartenders actually require certification to be a member of the bartending guild, we might see some alteration to this modern concept of guilds.
Now I'm not saying everybody can do every job as their must be some aptitude for a job (like not having a teacher run a cash register at McDonald's), but I do view modern guilds as a form of economic slavery as the freedom to shift job titles/positions is deliberately limited. After working in an area for 20 years, try writing a resume which successfully allows one to change career paths. It's very difficult as a resume is your work history and businesses taking applications for a job look for a candidate with that 'perfect fit' every time.
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I remember the player introductions at an Oklahoma football game when I was a yoot. I asked my dad what the hell was a "Hotel-Motel Management Major?
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My 16 yo daughter is working on starting her own business within the next year or two (she's not just dreaming about it either--she's actively working on what she needs to do). She says she's going to college (Hillsdale like her older sisters did) because she wants to to dig deeper into the stuff she's learned as a homeschooler (Western Civ, the great lit of the world, take a class from VDH, etc) not so she can get a job. ( Fortunately, for whatever she does an education at Hillsdale will put her a step ahead of her friends going to the state university.)
My oldest works as a TA while in grad school helping students with their papers. She has other master students coming to her for help. She said she's had her share of students who have no business in college. They struggle and many leave. The sad thing is they will always think of themselves as failures because they didn't get through college when they were in the wrong place to begin with.
My mom was hell-bent on all her kids going to college --2 of the 4 of us did (I always wanted to). They two who didn't tried and struggled and paid the price for years
in terms of struggling to figure out what they should be doing. She defined success as going to work at an office in a suit. One of my siblings works a building maintenace supervisor--he has a crew and actually is more of a manager than the guy who pushes the mop. My mom puts a good face up but she still wishes he'd taken the job a few years ago that he was offered in an office. She thought he was and was so delighted he'd could give up his landscaping job (his own business with his son) he had at the time.
I live near one of the largest high schools in the country. Property values reflect parents' desires to send their kids there. They boast 99% go on to college. They have FIVE, yes, five levels of honor students. LOL My kids have no desire to go there. They are quite happy to be at home. My view of the place? I'm not impressed. They all go off the the large public university and never know how stupid they are because college just becomes an extension of their high school days.
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They all go off the the large public university and never know how stupid they are because college just becomes an extension of their high school days.
I used to be a fan of Doonesbury, but it went off the liberal rails.
However, there was a Sunday comic I remember very well. So does this teacher's post that came up when I searched for that strip:
He also once had a great one that had the prof addressing an auditorium from a podium saying something along the lines that 20 years before he had a reading list of 20 books and the class was over capacity, then on down to that day where he assigned 1 book (or something like that) and then the final panel was two students sitting in the middle of empty seats saying something along the lines of "that much reading? I'm dropping outta here!"
That strip encapsulated, for me, what is wrong with college: The overall dumbing down of classwork so that every kids gets a trophy degree. High school graduates from a hundred years ago had more knowledge crammed into them than most college graduates today, especially in the Classics, mathematics and Civics/Government; logic and rhetoric were also important back then, and we see the effects of their removal from the classroom with the election of one Barack Hussein Obama.
I'm not sure whether our populace will wise up to the problem or not: Teaching to standardized tests is not teaching the joy in the thirst for knowledge. Like the 'give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime' adage, teach a child to read and think logically and they will do so for the rest of their lives; teach a child to pass a dumbed down standardized test and they will be dumbed down for the rest of their lives, and never know it.
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When each of my kids were 5 and ready for school (more or less) they were no smarter or dumber than any other kid around here. But we did one thing differently--we taught them at home. While my 16 year daughter's friends are reading the required summer reading list for their high school which includes some very nasty YA (young adult category) books (one of which I checked out and describes a teen couple's first sexual encounter in all its detail) she will be reading these:
•Homer, The Iliad of Homer. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1961.
•Homer, The Odyssey of Homer. Trans. Richmond Lattimore.
•Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy. Trans. Philip Vellacott. Penguin Books: London, 1959.
•Sophocles, The Theban Tragedies. Trans. E. F. Watling. Penguin Books: London, 1974.
•Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato. Trans. W.H.D. Rouse.
•Dorsch, T.S. Trans. Classical Literary Criticism. "Poetics" of Aristotle. Penguin Books: London, 2000.
And there are more like these she reads. And she LOVES it! She has little patience for what passes as literature and fiction (and even history) today.
My recent Hillsdale grad reads novels in French and classic literature like above in Latin.
People tell me I have such smart kids. I certainly can't do what they do--I had the crappy public school education. BUT I told them they could and would excell and gave them the tools to do it.
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And there are more like these she reads. And she LOVES it! She has little patience for what passes as literature and fiction (and even history) today.
Tell her don't sell some recent histories short.
Even though she's dead, Barbara Tuchman (January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) wrote some damn fine histories, A Distant Mirror being one of my favorites. She also wrote the The Guns of August (Pulitzer Prize), a really good exposition of the buildup to The Great War, and The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution, which I also enjoyed.
David McCullough has written some really good histories, including Truman (Pulitzer Prize), John Adams (Pulitzer Prize), and one of my favorites, 1776.
And last but not least, there are the classics, including William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, along with Suetonius, Arrian, Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, to name a bunch of classical historians. The classical historians are published in paperback by Penguin Books and I have quitre a few copies floating around my apartment which I reread from time to time (Arrian is being reread at the moment).
As for historical fiction, and there are some good historical fictions out there, try Robert Graves' I Claudius (it was a Masterpiece Theater entry in the late '70's). The Marcus Didius Falco novels set in Ancient Rome, by Lindsey Davis are a treat. I also happen to find just about any of Bernard Cornwell's historical novels a good read, from the Richard Sharpe series (about the wars against Napoleon), to his Middle Ages novel, Agincourt. Another good historical read are the Cadfael novels: "Brother Cadfael is the fictional main character in a series of historical murder mysteries written by the linguist-scholar Edith Pargeter under the name "Ellis Peters". The character of Cadfael himself is a Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey, in western England, in the first half of the 12th century. The historically accurate stories are set between about 1135 and about 1145, during "The Anarchy", the destructive contest for the crown of England between King Stephen and Empress Maud." Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield, about the Battle of Thermopylae, is another excellent read.
So don't let your daughter sell real history/biographies short, nor to underestimate the learning that can come from a good historical novel.
ETA: How could I forget? One of my all-time favorite historical novel series is the Horatio Hornblower saga, by C. S. Forester. I've read the entire series through three times, and wil do so again in the future. Truly a classic, with Ship of the Line being considered the best.
And in that seafaring vein, there is the history/autobiography, Two Years Before The Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, which recounts his two years on a whaling ship out of Massachusetts from 1834-1836. Published in 1846, it was a considered a groundbreaker in its day.
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Tell her don't sell some recent histories short.
So don't let your daughter sell real history/biographies short, nor to underestimate the learning that can come from a good historical novel.
You list some good ones I'll tell her about--
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Sophomore year a professor explained, you go to college to get and education, you go to work to make money. If you want to make a lot of money, go to work.
That must have been the last Conservative Prof. to teach about the real world. ::whoohoo::
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My interest in history was sparked by a single lecture in a community college American History course I took when I was 19. (I had dropped out of high school, got a GED, then took some community college courses.)
Before that, I had no interest in history. After that there was no stopping me. I'm a confirmed history buff now, and that probably encompasses most of the books I read. (Alas, I spend so much time on the internet that I don't have as much time for reading actual books as I would like.)
I second the recommendation of The Guns of August. It's one of the best books I've ever read, and it reads like a thriller.
But to my way of thinking, there's much more to history than nations, leaders, and wars. There are all kinds of niche areas of history. Some of my favorite fields are histories of baseball, aviation, and spaceflight. I've acquired and read a lot of books in those areas. You could probably find books about the history of makeup, if you're interested in that.
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But to my way of thinking, there's much more to history than nations, leaders, and wars. There are all kinds of niche areas of history. Some of my favorite fields are histories of baseball, aviation, and spaceflight. I've acquired and read a lot of books in those areas. You could probably find books about the history of makeup, if you're interested in that.
I think one of the reasons my children always liked history is that I taught it in our homeschool as more than dates and events and things to memorize for a test. (I actually cared little about that because I found if they were interested remembering came easily). I showed them it was about people --who had lives and had to make choices---and that hooked them along with visiting museums and historic places where I would wonder aloud to spark a conversation something like "Wonder what they were thinking as they walked along here?"
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I think one of the reasons my children always liked history is that I taught it in our homeschool as more than dates and events and things to memorize for a test. (I actually cared little about that because I found if they were interested remembering came easily). I showed them it was about people --who had lives and had to make choices---and that hooked them along with visiting museums and historic places where I would wonder aloud to spark a conversation something like "Wonder what they were thinking as they walked along here?"
I understand your point, but I think dates and events are important to be able to place the panorama of historical people in context.
As for dates, to me, some dates ARE important. Of course, historians argue over which ones, but I'll throw out some of mine:
1) 480 BC, the Battle of Thermopylae, keeping the Persian Empire out of Greece, allowing for the birth of Western 'democracy';
2) 44 BC, the assassination of Julius Caesar, formally putting an end to the Republic of Rome and ushering in the Roman Empire;
3) 312 AD, the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity;
4) 732 AD, the Battle of Tours, stopping the muslim jihad outside Paris;
5) 1215 AD, Magna Carta signed at Runnymede, outlining the rights of governed subjects with relation to a king;
6) 1415 AD, the Battle of Agincourt, the English longbow signalling the end of armored knights;
7) 1588 AD, the Spanish Armada defeated, keeping the protestant Elizabeth secure on the throne of England;
8) 1607 AD, the first permanent European settlers arrive in the New World;
9) 1683 AD, the Battle at the Gates of Vienna, stopping the second major muslim jihad;
10) 1776 AD (a little Amerocentricism), the US Declaration of Independence signed, showing how a revolution may be born in blood, but does not have to degenerate into a bloodbath;
11) 1789 AD, The Bastille in Paris is stormed, unleashing the bloodbath of the French Revolution and giving rise to Napoleon;
12) 1815 AD, Napoleon defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, stopping the exportation of French revolutionary ideas;
13) 1917 AD, the Bolsheviks take over Russia by revolutionary force, and overthrow the tsar, setting the stage for the major ideological (hot and cold) conflict of the 20th Century;
14) 1945 AD, the first atomic bomb detonated, changing the world forever;
15) 1969 AD, a US astronaut is the first man to walk on the moon;
16) 2001 AD, muslims attack and destroy the World Trade Center, permanently changing the world once again;
17) 2012 AD, the defeat of Barack Obama in his reelection bid /////// (sort of).
Now this list is by no means exhaustive, and is debatable. I make no mention of Alexander the Great, of China or Japan, of Africa or India, which have had major events which changed the world. the Battle of Gaugamela (331 BC), the discovery of gunpowder and paper, the rise of ancient man ('Lucy'), the origin of the mathematical concept of zero, and many more. But understand just those dates and events on my list and you will have a very good grasp of the depth and breadth of recorded history.
I also find dates are important so one can understand the War of 1812 came before The American Civil War came before Custer's Last Stand came before The Spanish-American War. While dates may be boring, historical context is lost without knowing them.
/A degree in History
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I like dates too. They are important to know.
August 17, 1958: The world's first attempt to launch a probe to the Moon, by the U.S. Air Force (NASA didn't yet exist). It didn't make it.
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But to my way of thinking, there's much more to history than nations, leaders, and wars. There are all kinds of niche areas of history. Some of my favorite fields are histories of baseball, aviation, and spaceflight. I've acquired and read a lot of books in those areas. You could probably find books about the history of makeup, if you're interested in that.
I think one of the reasons my children always liked history is that I taught it in our homeschool as more than dates and events and things to memorize for a test. (I actually cared little about that because I found if they were interested remembering came easily). I showed them it was about people --who had lives and had to make choices---and that hooked them along with visiting museums and historic places where I would wonder aloud to spark a conversation something like "Wonder what they were thinking as they walked along here?"
My Mother tells me she too disliked learning history in school because of the emphasis on dates. Once she was an adult, she found a renewed interest thanks to historically-correct novels, and because of the examples you give -- it was the people and their lives and the story woven around the event that captured her attention. And, as you say, remembering the dates came naturally, then, and in context.
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They all go off the the large public university and never know how stupid they are because college just becomes an extension of their high school days.
I used to be a fan of Doonesbury, but it went off the liberal rails.
However, there was a Sunday comic I remember very well. So does this teacher's post that came up when I searched for that strip:
He also once had a great one that had the prof addressing an auditorium from a podium saying something along the lines that 20 years before he had a reading list of 20 books and the class was over capacity, then on down to that day where he assigned 1 book (or something like that) and then the final panel was two students sitting in the middle of empty seats saying something along the lines of "that much reading? I'm dropping outta here!"
That strip encapsulated, for me, what is wrong with college: The overall dumbing down of classwork so that every kids gets a trophy degree. High school graduates from a hundred years ago had more knowledge crammed into them than most college graduates today, especially in the Classics, mathematics and Civics/Government; logic and rhetoric were also important back then, and we see the effects of their removal from the classroom with the election of one Barack Hussein Obama.
I'm not sure whether our populace will wise up to the problem or not: Teaching to standardized tests is not teaching the joy in the thirst for knowledge. Like the 'give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime' adage, teach a child to read and think logically and they will do so for the rest of their lives; teach a child to pass a dumbed down standardized test and they will be dumbed down for the rest of their lives, and never know it.
Dumbing down of classwork is an understatement. Most of my sons college exams are online. He has the opportunity to take some of them up to 4 times.....Constantly grade on a curve. I want to call it comical, but it's tragic.
We are herded sheep and the kid who reads or those who think for themselves are labeled by society as the odd ones.
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I like dates too.
I remember Sept of 1962, my first date with a cute clarinet player in the band - only I was too scared to try and kiss her. :)
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But to my way of thinking, there's much more to history than nations, leaders, and wars. There are all kinds of niche areas of history. Some of my favorite fields are histories of baseball, aviation, and spaceflight. I've acquired and read a lot of books in those areas. You could probably find books about the history of makeup, if you're interested in that.
I think one of the reasons my children always liked history is that I taught it in our homeschool as more than dates and events and things to memorize for a test. (I actually cared little about that because I found if they were interested remembering came easily). I showed them it was about people --who had lives and had to make choices---and that hooked them along with visiting museums and historic places where I would wonder aloud to spark a conversation something like "Wonder what they were thinking as they walked along here?"
My Mother tells me she too disliked learning history in school because of the emphasis on dates. Once she was an adult, she found a renewed interest thanks to historically-correct novels, and because of the examples you give -- it was the people and their lives and the story woven around the event that captured her attention. And, as you say, remembering the dates came naturally, then, and in context.
My children learn dates and events and places etc. Half of every exam they take is identifying dates and places and names. But in public school the only way to assess "learning" is to test for those so that's the emphasis (at least in schools by us). The second half of my kids' exams are challenging essays requiring facts and strong analysis comparing events, decisions and consequences, etc (for example--explain the role violence plays in the founding of Rome using examples.)
My comment about it referred to the idea that many think that's history--a bunch of dates/when something happened. Of course, you need to know the order of events but that's only a small step towards understanding history--the why and what it means.
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Dumbing down of classwork is an understatement. Most of my sons college exams are online. He has the opportunity to take some of them up to 4 times.....Constantly grade on a curve. I want to call it comical, but it's tragic.
Yeah, it is tragic. It hurts everyone, even the genuinely successful students because they're left wondering how much of their achievement is really their own. I remember having a conversation with my professor in organic chemistry and he said he doesn't teach the same course he taught in the 70s. I like to think I would have done well in the same academic environment decades ago, but I guess that is something I will never know.
The Bachelor's degree basically became "the new high school diploma" because companies were prevented by anti-discrimination laws from explicitly testing applicants' aptitude via standardized testing, and because the value of the high school diploma had deteriorated so substantially (again, see first reason). Now we're seeing some evidence of Master's degrees becoming "the new Bachelor's degree" for the same reasons.
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I like dates too.
I remember Sept of 1962, my first date with a cute clarinet player in the band - only I was too scared to try and kiss her. :)
I was 5. Girls still had cooties.
My eldest is in college majoring in mechanical engineering. Some of his classes are real. You have to pay attention.
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A college degree is simply the entry point for access to modern day guilds. Guilds, I might add, with their own language and customs, which is why they are guilds. The legal, accounting, social work,, education, etc., professions all have their own language and customs with membership in that guild only accessible with a college degree preprogrammed for entry. Think anyone can study law on their own and become a member of the bar, as Lincoln did? Think a mathematician or a physicist can teach high school math or science? (NYC tried that under Giuliani, having people with business/real life experiences teach, but the teachers' union put the kibosh on that -- they were not members of the guild!)
When bartenders actually require certification to be a member of the bartending guild, we might see some alteration to this modern concept of guilds.
Now I'm not saying everybody can do every job as their must be some aptitude for a job (like not having a teacher run a cash register at McDonald's), but I do view modern guilds as a form of economic slavery as the freedom to shift job titles/positions is deliberately limited. After working in an area for 20 years, try writing a resume which successfully allows one to change career paths. It's very difficult as a resume is your work history and businesses taking applications for a job look for a candidate with that 'perfect fit' every time.
Funny that you mentioned guilds i that a large portion of professors are Marxist or lean that way and the very concept of guilds is what Karl was rebelling against and now once again in a totally different language a new guild like system has been shoved into place by those Marxists.. Total insanity, my friends.
It just proves our points that education is designed around the concept od "more education is better" when in fact less of public education is preferrable to better one's children.
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My daughter is reading Academically Adrift, Limited Learning on College Campuses. I'm reading it too because every other paragraph she feels compelled to read it aloud to me. We're only to page 81 of a 200 page book and I can say it would be worth your while to seek it out. For example, they point out that in recent decades 30% of C students and 15% of C- or lower students are admitted to college. Realistically, how many of them are going to find success at college? The book also points out the number of students who don't graduate after 5 years and 6 years (I can't find the number right now)-- in other words all those high schools who brag about their % of students attending college aren't telling their parents how many actually graduate.
This is why a college degree is worth less today even though it costs more.