Stupid ass private education bullshit
It doesn’t.
It costs money to get a piece of paper that proves you got smarter.
You can go to any public library and get access to nearly published material to learn from for free.
All you’re missing now is academia. So go bum around a public university library and ask some college student if they canl check something out for you. Admittedly there’s a money piece here, there’s way around it, not all of them legal, but that’d be your easiest path.
The piece of paper is a barrier to entry, an entrenchment of academia in the global economy.
Read some Ivan Illich on the topic (Deschooling Society), he’s pretty lucid and still very relevant 50+ years later.
I understand that most universities and classes allow anyone to “audit” them. You can go to the lectures but you earn no credits.
Free education would empower ‘those’ people. And the right desperately needs an other to denigrate.
Here in Sweden education is free, and the government provides a (small) monthly payout to students.
And we still have 700.000 people in poverty, because they dont want to study and learn anything even when its free.
Of course the majority are immigrants living on wellfare but the news cant say that.
It’s one of the things I’m most grateful about living in Sweden. I wouldn’t be able to pursue higher education otherwise.
Here in Sweden education is free
Free at point of service. But it’s 7% of Swedish GDP, with all of that coming from public coffers.
Compare it to the US, which spends only 5.5% of GDP on education, with the majority on the heavily privatized university level.
The math gets worse when you look at student/teacher ratios, administration overhead, building construction, and spending on extracurriculars like sports.
Americans spend less overall than their swedish counterparts, but far more on amenities that have nothing to do with the actual mechanics of education.
According to my American economics education, this proves the American system is actually more efficient. Swedes would do better to adopt our model, if they want to be A#1 Liberty Whiskey Sexy, like we are.
More efficient for whom? And how? Because this is kind of hard to agree with when the efficient solution is a small amount of people with huge amounts of debt and everyone else not getting an education even if they want it.
I mean, what’s the point of public coffers if they aren’t being spent on public good?
Social infrastructure FTW, a far more respectable way to run the ship. I’ll keep with the boat analogy to use another idiom; “a rising tide lifts all boats” society shows wisdom in encouraging the kinds of conditions where their citizens can succeed without significant barriers, and improve the whole of it afterward (instead of the banking institutions which extend predatory high-interest loans) with their success. Hats off to Sweden.
I got beat for refusing to work in a mall hanging clothing while the “school” took my pay for my education at sped ed. Sweden should think about running things here instead…
I believe New Zealand does this as well?
Disclaimer: I 100% support “free” healthcare and “free” education.
Being a teacher is a job. Being a college professor is a job. Being a nurse is a job. Being a janitor for a college campus is a job. People need money and benefits to do jobs. We’ve not yet achieved a post-scarcity economy where people can work without being reimbursed for their efforts.
Anyone who labels the goal of providing publicly-funded education or publicly-funded healthcare as “free” is either arguing in bad faith or too naive to understand what the goal should be. As a society we should provide public services, such as education and healthcare, to all humans who ask for it. For the good of all humans. But it’s something we all have to collectively fund.
Free to the user… Are you just trying to muddy this water?
Not at all.
By calling for education and healthcare to be free, you’re voluntarily giving ammunition to politicians that they can use to sway low-information voters.
If every person who supported public education and public healthcare stopped calling it free right now, the people against these public services would still call them free. Because they want it to sound like people are trying to get something for nothing. They like it when we call it free.
Calling something free just conforms to the narrative that education and healthcare are something you would have to pay for in the first place. Why would you ever have to pay for a basic human right?
It doesn’t benefit the ruling class if too many of the wrong people access education; they may get ideas.
may start voting to the wrong politicians
A man I respect quite a lot used to say that college should pay a full-time wage to the students. It should be challenging, it should be a real education (which a lot of modern college is not), and in exchange for that, if you are improving your understanding of the world and your ability to contribute to society, that should be something that society pays you a pretty decent wage for, because it’s a fucking valuable activity.
Which also means there should be rigorous standards to continue; similar accountability to any other job.
You shouldn’t be able to collect a hefty check and be like my college friend. He who failed out of our college 4 times because he was just there to go to bars do his own thing (which was not going to class or doing homework or really anything else).
I taught 3rd year humanities students in a communication related course who could not string words together into a coherent sentence. All their writing was education gore and I could only get through it by briefly pretending it was avant garde. We collectively let them get that far with core incompetencies. Shame.
It really should be a challenge. The saying at my kids college/university was “A ‘C’ gets a degree”. And while “haha that’s funny” there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
For work, my team and I work with engineer types, and its been a 10 years span of helping them. The newer graduates are a mixed bag: some are bright and innovative, and some are coasters.
We’ve had young guys asking for help on a problem, and as you help they start replying to text messages on social media, missing the entire “help” session you provide.
We’ve had grads struggle with simple counting / talling.
We have done step by step troubleshooting documentation. Then field a call from somebody saying the steps don’t work. OK let’s see your system and go through the steps. Let’s check Step 1.
Them: oh I didn’t do step one, because it said I didn’t have system permission. So I just did step 2 onward.I could go on, but I should end this rant LOL.
Yeah. I was really blessed in terms of my upbringing that my family deeply valued education and taught me what was education and what was a stupid waste of time (which, some but not all of the public school US education I got was) and why the education was a vital human sacred thing. And so when I got to college I really wanted the real education part. It really alarmed me when people would be happy about the easy bullshit classes or upset about the difficult classes. Like bro… why the fuck are you even here? Learn HVAC instead, you’ll save some money on loans and you can probably make more than you would as a data analyst or whatever the fuck.
The saying at my kids college/university was “A ‘C’ gets a degree”. And while “haha that’s funny” there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
I’ve been in classes when I could ace the class in my sleep and classes where I busted ass to pass.
Grades tend to be highly subjective, not just by subject or material but by the course instructor and the school’s attitude towards GPA. Sort of a joke that getting an “A” in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers. You’re de facto assumed smart if you’re in the Ivy League. But you have to prove yourself against the field in these more accessible schools.
Sort of a joke that getting an “A” in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers.
I’ve taken classes at a few different schools including Harvard. This is absolutely not true. You don’t really have to be smart to do well at Harvard, although it helps, but you absolutely do have to bust your ass (in a way you do not at other top-tier schools as long you have some familiarity with the subject going into it.)
There would have to be limitations on how many people could get paid for some degree types. It doesn’t do society much good to foot the bill for degrees that don’t have actual related job opportunities. It could maybe work where just heavily needed jobs get wages paid, while other degrees are only offered under the current system.
Another thing here is that this would be another form of taxes used to directly benefit businesses. If taxes pay to educate a lot more employees for a job market, the companies in that market would directly benefit by being able to pay lower wages. I wonder if we could do a different system where companies could offer sponsorships for specific degrees in exchange for employment, similar to how ROTC works.
A quality education teaches how yo learn which applies to absolutely every single job that exists. Yes, even the simple ones like basic labor.
I’m not talking just about “heavily needed jobs.” I am saying that having an educated populace, one that can tell up from down as far as making sense of the factual world and world events, is incalculably valuable. They can be truck drivers for all I care, but if they can watch Fox News and realize they’re being lied to, the whole country will be in a better place.
It’ll also be nice if you have people skilled at engineering and things, the “job qualification” part is also important, but the Germany in the 1930s had plenty of people super-skilled at chemistry and engineering, and look where it got them.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved in higher education, then the republicans got big mad about that and changed the rules because they’re racist pieces of shit. They would rather make everyone suffer if it hurts one person who isn’t a white christian republican.
There’s more detail but that’s the short version.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved
Black students, Jewish students, East Asian students… Anyone who wasn’t a WASP with wealthy parents.
George Bush Jr famously had to make Yale his safety school because he couldn’t qualify for UTexas.
Here in Aus it was free up until the 90’s. When one of my coworkers told me that I actually nearly started the revolution then and there lmao. All this talk about how hecs is a good system from all these privileged ass old people when they didn’t have to pay a dollar >:(
For what its worth, you can sit in on most if not all lectures, without paying. Tutorials, exams and the fancy robe and paper cost, but to sit and listen to the lectures is free at all unis. Some caveats apply regarding crowding, but generally you can acquire knowledge for free.
Something something bootstraps avocado toast. 🙄
So that’s why the USA is the primary source of monetised knowledge. Fwiw I fully support pirating educational media, because if many countries of the world can access a significant amount of education for free, everyone should have the same chance, regardless of how the government of the locale wants to rule and restrict it.
I support fair wages for those who deliver publicly available services at material cost only or lower, so I support taxation that finances it and minimum wage regulation. Even though I believe the current minimum wage in the West isn’t sufficiently regulated. It needs to triple in order to catch up to the ‘inflation’, or the perceived monetary value of everything.
Can you elaborate? I’ve never heard this before, and for most of the 1960s it was the Democrats who were the racist pieces of shit (to the extent it was even partisan).
Not saying you’re wrong; I have a vague notion that Reagan mostly was the one who ruined higher education but I don’t actually know that much about it. Is there something I can read about this though?
Yeah, so it was Reagan. It doesn’t sound really racial, it sounds like it was a reaction against the antiwar and student activism movement (which was definitely not exclusively a black thing). Sounds like it was Republicans, yes, but more than racism it was just part and parcel of them hating things that make America successful or enable us to compete (because that makes them feel weak, because they can’t.)
I might argue the Vietnam War was what really changed things. Once college became a means of draft dodging, universities filled up with blue collar kids looking for deferment.
Colleges responded by tightening enrollment standards and setting up new barriers to entry, some of which were financial.
It’s still free. You’re not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials. No one is stopping you from going to the library and learning. The internet hosts a large wealth of knowledge.
I’m ready for those downvotes, but it’s just a hardpill to swollow
I would argue that primarily youre paying for the recognition of your education, as in your diploma, which is often what employers look at.
Sure. Depends on what exactly. A teacher should have a formal education, backed by a paper while say a tradesperson should have informal hands-on training. (just saying for an employment hiring stand point)
I guess what I’m saying is: if you think that learning is strictly at the institution level, you are missing out on things that aren’t taught.
I don’t disagree at all, Information has always been out there for those who seek it out, the problem lies within capitalism, which only values education that has been paid for.
Often jobs will require a degree and experience, even trades that you say require informal training often require some sort of red seal or at least have an apprenticeship program.
You can get that education however you like, but its a bit more difficult to find an employer in a labour flooded market that is willing to let you prove your knowledge if you don’t have the recognition to back it up.
The education isn’t any less fruitful, but it is just valued less by the ruling class simply because it didn’t require money.
You’re ignoring safety.
Last thing I want is a Civil Engineer who’s not been properly vetted.
We have enough facility failures even with civil engineering certs. Imagine if it was more cavalier.
That’s a super good point!!
Most employers won’t actually check, just lie and say you have the degree if you’re confident you have the knowledge
Or, as a friend found out the reality of the situation… often employers don’t give a shit about the degree if you can do what you say you can.
Have an acquaintance that started clerking in the northeast for a small company that maintained it’s own mail server. One Windows update later, the mail server collapsed and no one could sort it. Acquaintance managed to fix it in a handful of hours and became the company IT guy.
A decade later he moves to California and finds a job running a mail server for a company doing battlefield simulations for the DOD during Desert Storm.
No degree needed, just can you keep the mail servers up and secure? Sure. No problem. Used that experience to eventually land even better jobs in IT.
Its the skill sets that matter most often. The people that focus on degrees are focusing on the leveraged nature of the fresh faced kids coming out of schools - they can be run like tops while they’re still paying off the loans. And they are.
You’re not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials.
Bingo. When my mom went to the University of New Hampshire in 1962, they had one cafeteria in the Student Untion Building and the athletics was run out of a “field house” built in the 40’s and the students in dorms slept on WWII surplus cots in a room with 4 others. The amenities were sparse, to say the least.
60+ years later, it’s all spiffy amenities, a huge arena with the bells and whistles for the athletics department and shared rooms with washer/dryer hookups and a Memorial Union building that contains the restaurant/cafeterias “dining halls” now… and the cost soared once the flashy stuff was added in.
Thing is, it’s been a self-feeding spiral as schools raised prices, parents demanded more luxuries for their little darlings, so the schools went into a upgrade game with each other that took on the tint of a competition and it just furthered the pressure on the price to rise.
The education - the actual purpose of the schools - seems to have gotten lost in the game of chasing after the money.
This is part of why I’ve been telling my friends kids to aim for a trade school with an apprenticeship or journeymen’s program tied to it. Done right, the kids can come out of the school go right into paid training and be debt-free and working by the time they’re 20.
And honestly, given how shit the quality of housing built in the last few decades has been, it’s gong to be a guarantee that repair and maintenance is the wave of the future.
Sause: Have been in the Trades since 1980…
hardpill to swollow
Oof…not looking good for my case 😂
This is exactly right. There are countless free classes on coursera, edx and Harvard for free. And read. Read real books, daily. A degree costs money because it’s proof of learning. In theory. It really isn’t, of course, because most US universities are diploma mills.
It’s still free. You’re not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials. No one is stopping you from going to the library and learning. The internet hosts a large wealth of knowledge.I’m ready for those downvotes, but it’s just a hardpill to swollow
You’re not actually saying anything useful here.
While it is true that the desire to acquire knowledge comes from within, you’re utterly disregarding how lack of access to educators, equipment, facilities, etc., can slow down or halt individual progress.
You’ve also disregarded some rather serious regulatory issues; I don’t go to self-taught doctors, and don’t want self-taught engineers designing my bridges and airplanes.
I’m saying education doesn’t always equal a degree.
Yes, some fields should have formal education, but what people pay is not for the education, it’s the experience of the instuctors, tools, class material, ect. Those are what we are paying for
I’m saying education doesn’t always equal a degree.Yes, some fields should have formal education, but what people pay is not for the education, it’s the experience of the instuctors, tools, class material, ect. Those are what we are paying for
Tl;dr: you posted a banal platitude with a definite implication, and are now being made to walk back and diminish the scope of the intellectual turd you dropped.
Both you, and everyone else reading this understands that my summary is accurate.
We all know this to be true, as you literally invited it with your first message:
I’m ready for those downvotes, but it’s just a hardpill to swollow
What a fucking lame way to get your dopamine.
It’s not a hard pill to swallow. You’re ignoring that not everyone learns by reading a book. Some people learn be performing actions, some learn by observing instructors. Just because the way that works for you is free doesn’t mean that everyone has access to that.
Right, which is why you are paying for education. You pay for the instructor’s knowledge and hands on approach. You’re not paying for the information itself, rather the experience someone else is taking time to show you.
You can get books free on how to build a log cabin. Thousands of settlers built their own cabin, but they had the knowledge. If they didn’t they paid for someone to teach them or build it for them. Not too much different now
Institution based learning is unbelievably more effective though. Professional educators, structured courses and external reviews of ones learning are not only helpful, for higher levels of education they are vital. No amount of going to the library will make you a surgeon or an engineer or a scientist.
Institution based learning
iscan be unbelievably more effective.Institution based learning also creates a bunch of barriers primarily because “learning” is not the main purpose of a modern university.
Those “professional educators” are often researchers moonlighting as educators, experts on their field, but rarely in addition to education. Their metrics are also not how well is material “taught” but to achieve a standard distribution of grades which can result in some real perverse incentives.
Those “structured courses” have the same fundamental design flaw of primary education. They aren’t designed primarily for learning, they’re designed for factory work and obedience.
That’s not touching on the more critical part of financial incentives and how financial strain, and excessive amounts of stress in general, is not conducive to a learning environment.
Source: self made electric engineer thanks to the library and the dump.
Not denying that. But there is more knowledge found than at a university. My arguement was that you are paying the teacher whom has first hand experience they can share to their students, not strictly education itself.
And you believe the burden of that payment should be placed on the young and uneducated?
Not sure where you thought I was implying that
To be fair a lot of college graduates learn very little.
Khan Academy is also free and amazing. It’s possible with free YouTube and KA to learn nearly any subject you desire.
This may not be a popular opinion but I personally reject the belief that universities have a monopoly on education. In fact I think most are designed to create a more compliant employee.
That said libraries are free, piracy is free, YouTube hosts millions of lectures by experts in their field and can be downloaded to watch or listen offline. I personally have spent the past couple years learning about the affects of US imperialism and haven’t spent a cent on it
I think most are designed to create a more compliant employee.
Thus is exactly it. The diploma is proof that you’re willing to play the game and become a debtor and can be squeezed - HARD - because of it.
Self teaching isn’t a replacement for structured education. Making children pay money for school because the library is free would see literacy rates drop and is a brain dead take.
In my country at least public education is free. Higher education is paid for, I don’t think it’s a radical belief that learning takes place outside of university
So why should the financial burden of education be placed on the uneducated. That’s what I’m asking here.
Ok, well that’s certainly not how you phrased it in the original question man. You kept it pretty vague and relatively open to interpretation. Might have been worth narrowing the scope a bit
P.s. the answer to your question is capitalism. You must keep the poor in their station so you can continue to benefit from their labor
RIP Aaron Swartz
It doesn’t? You’re paying for brand recognition and a piece of paper that says you can follow directions and spend money. Learning is free. Don’t let capitalism tell you what’s important.
You can’t learn as efficiently outside of learning institutions than within them. Additionally, certain levels of education require a structured environment. No amount of self education will turn you into a surgeon, engineer or scientist. These are professions built on decades to centuries of accumulated knowledge and require continuous external review from teachers to be learned.
If your goal is to participate in education as a vehicle for capitalism then yeah, you’re gonna have to pay for it. If you want to learn how to support bees so they flourish, that’s pretty easy to do without a lot of money. Regardless, Joe Schmo with a GED and Elon Musk are both gonna die one day.
There are all sorts of classes available at top schools via opencourseware. You can take the highest tier courses that the US has to offer, and become educated. While not degree offering, it still would look great on a CV, if you can somehow prove you did the work.
Free books. A few years ago, I read a free electrical engineering book available on the internet, which I found fascinating. It has been a little helpful in practice as well, but I think it’s just cool to know how capacitors and motors work. Public libraries exist for a reason. Gutenberg is another option.
Many 2 year community colleges are now free tuition if you reside in the state.
And of course, there are still ways to get a degree cheap, if the paper is important to you. I finally landed at WGU 15 years ago and it was very reasonable, and has paid dividends on my original investment.
The only cost to an education or learning about subjects, ideas and people these days is the cost in TIME, NUTRITION AND EFFORT
Sure you can spend tens of thousands of dollars and go to university, college or whatever institution for a whole bunch of years and learn a bunch of stuff. Or you can just take the time to read a bunch of books, study them, learn from them on your own time.
I never had the opportunity to attend post secondary school … I read, I write on my own and do things on my own. I’m not the smartest person but I’ve surprised my more educated friends and family in my ability to know a lot about many things. I’ve also traveled the world to many countries and in each country I visited, I took the time to read about it’s history, read books from there and learn as much as I could about it all. I also enjoy learning about the latest technologies, so I’ve learned to tear apart computers, put them back together, install, uninstall, reinstall an OS and just generally play around with computer systems often. I have friends who are teachers and nurses with qualification in many things and lots of education, yet they come to me to fix their computers and they’re surprised when I can talk to them about most subjects about history, politics, travel, countries, science, technology and many other things.
I hate to say it because it sounds stupid … but having an education these days often doesn’t amount to much. Unless you have a well defined goal as to what you want to do and you have a lot money, resources and support, you get to become a well rounded, educated, knowledgeable and capable individual. Otherwise, the majority of post secondary educated people I’ve seen are just people collected certifications and diplomas to add to a collection and don’t really gain much of an education in anything valuable.
Read, read books, read all kinds of things and read often … it’s probably the biggest thing they get people to do in higher education. There is so much content out there that is freely available. Read, watch and listen to lectures that are freely available in all sorts of sites and made by actual highly educated and knowledgeable professors and professionals. Find those free resources that are vetted, recommended by people you trust.
The other part of the equation I honestly believe is nutrition. Eat properly and eat enough of the right things. My mom literally raised us on oatmeal every morning. I grew up with kids who ate sugar pops or nothing at all and the majority of them didn’t end up with a good life path. Then we seldom had processed foods as mom and dad were hunters and trappers that fed us a steady diet of wild meat and especially fresh fish. We’re Indigenous so a lot of our diet was from the land … we were poor and didn’t get to eat much but the food we ate was highly natural and nutritious. Eat enough good natural food, enough protein and fats, exercise, walk and train if you are young and capable and all that nutrition and blood pumping will get you to learn more, faster and retain things longer. The younger you do all this, the better it is because the older you become, the harder it is to do anything.
That’s great and all but individual learning isn’t a replacement for societal structures that foster and encourage education. Society wide the argument of “just read books lmao” doesn’t increase the education level of a population. These things are achieved by coordinated efforts and institutional education.
It might not be better … but it is certainly a lot cheaper
Higher education is a positional good. That means you’re not paying to learn, you’re paying to be ranked among the top X%. By definition only so many people can be in the top X%, so it’s an arms race dynamic just bidding up the price of education.
That’s also why Harvard doesn’t create a chain of schools like the for-profits. They’re not better at education. They’re selling exclusivity.
