| The 'education' of today is starting to look more and more like job training. However, education is meant to expand your mind and to teach you how to think critically. Education is supposed to round you out, teach you about the history of your culture. Adam Gopnik once wrote a piece for the New Yorker. The gist of it is that he was living in Paris, and his wife was pregnant with a girl, after having already had a boy. When French people found out about this the would always say to him: "Mais c'est le choix du roi!"[1] Finally after a taxi driver said the same thing to him for the 10th time, he asked a bit exasperatedly, what it meant. The point of the anecdote is that the taxi driver then proceeded to explain how under the Salic law governing the succession of French royalty, having a son followed by a girl had certain advantages. That is education populace. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/01/31/like-a-king (Paywalled) |
We could blame this on our educational institutions of course. And I'd agree that our institutions have changed. But this gets into the question of why have they changed? And I think there we get back to the initial issue. As we see vastly more people pursuing post-secondary education, it means that the demographic of your average student is changing. Systems that worked and produced a certain tier of student when dealing with top e.g. 2% of society, cannot reasonably be expected to achieve the same or comparable results when dealing with more than 30% of society.
This is what made me ask the question. In principle I cannot disagree with the notion that an educated population is a good thing. But in practice, universities are seemingly giving it their all to make me rethink this view.