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I'm very familier with these views and staunchly opposed to them. Here the idea is that only a small portion of the population is "college worthy" and only those elites should be going to college. This then implies we don't need "too many" educated people and economy perhaps can't even handle them. I don't subscribe to any of these. I believe, education needs to be distangled from jobs. People should not be educated for the sole purpose of slaving away 8 hours a day somewhere. Education is about learning, deeper reflections, aquiring skills you enjoy, developing reasoning, identifying pitfalls, dealing with abstractions, practising scientific methods, becoming desciplined. Only as side effect of all these, you might be able to also do well at some job. This means everyone is entitled to the highest level of education. In an ideal world, all humans should obtain a PhD in something they are passionate about, something they believe in and something they are interested in. Now here's the problem. We have mutilated our education philosophy to the extent that it is no longer recognizable from what it used to be. When you step in modern day institutes, the education is all about getting good grades and passing exames. I have met inenumerable humans, starting from Kindergarten to PhDs where they are forced to memorize things, instead of really understand things in order to pass exams. People who don't have great memory powers are forced out of the system. Other day I was looking at 1st grade history lesson on Columbus. What was the test exam questions? Name the ships! Why does name of ships matter at all? Why not teach kids instead reason he needed 3 ships? My core hypothesis is that all humans are curious, we all want to learn something, we all have some interests. We destroy most of these attributes as we grow up by making it a massive memorization contest with prizes given as pass and fail. Then we make it all about jobs so folks are forced to learn things they were never interested in the first place. |