The Decaying Evolution of Education...

[sheeplady]

I think working a trade is great, but honestly I'd want my children to have skills they can fall back on that don't require physical labor, purely because I would not want them to become minorly disabled and unable to find work.

Right now, if I worked a physical job (lifting more than 5 pounds, specifically), I would be on state disability. In order for me to work any job requiring lifting, I would need specialized equipment that is not covered by insurance, and would cost the state healthcare more to provide me with than disability payments. Luckily, barring cognitive impairment or severe pain, there's not a lot of things that can disable you out of working in academia.

I imagine most of that "grades they think they deserve" stuff came directly from shallow, status-obsessed parents who raised them that way.

I've never had a college student "demand" a higher grade, and I've worked with some students who grew up in little bubbles... the type of students whose Mommy and Daddy bought them a BMW for high school graduation. I did have one student come and try to earn/ negotiate a better grade, but she came with evidence and justification (she basically did the final group project by herself, which her teammates admitted). Granted, I've only been teaching since 2008, but I figure this whole "I deserve an A" attitude would be more prevalent since you hear about it so much.

 

[JimWagner]

The physical demands of some jobs certainly can be major long term problems. The summer after high school I worked on a railroad rebuilding boxcars. That was an outdoor job using a cutting torch and slinging around heavy steel. Nothing on a boxcar is light weight. I rather enjoyed the work and was the strongest by the end of the summer that I'd ever be in my whole life.

But I would have had to been blind not to see the effects that job was having on the men who had been doing it for 20 years. Or deaf to not hear them tell me to take advantage of being young enough to go back to school and learn how to do something else. They knew it was a summer job and I was headed off to electronics school. They also knew I was tempted to blow off school and stay on.

I ended up eventually with a 40 year career as a computer programmer but I respect those people who choose for whatever reasons to work with their hands.

 

[MikeKardec]

I ended up eventually with a 40 year career as a computer programmer but I respect those people who choose for whatever reasons to work with their hands.

Whether we call it physical work or not, programming and many other jobs, can be very hard on the body! Harder than some "trades" occasionally.

I teach at a small university in Mississippi... I have become more and more jaded with the quality of the students here. For the most part, they have such a high sense of entitlement... expect to do little and are aghast when they don't get the high grades they believe they deserve.

A few years ago, I had a young man in some of my classes from Germany... and he was a delight... He was smart... he was challenging... at times I feared the questions he would ask during class. He always scored the highest grades on exams and assignments.

I might have mentioned this: my students were VERY sensitive about the power differential between teachers and students and used to exploit it to make themselves victims ... even though they obviously weren't intimidated by that differential when demanding the things they wanted and even just making the argument that professors didn't have the "right" to do this or that. It did, however, make me realize that there is a potential and legitimate conflict of interest and I always wanted to start a program where students were graded by outside (say a sister college) and anonymous peer review, or through high pressure testing done by an external agency, like the bar. Then the prof and the student would be working together on the same team against the exam. It might motivate students and help them work together and in a more cooperative relationship with the prof.

My experience working with Germans for the last 30 years is that in much of Europe (but Germany in particular) having a string of initials after your name to indicate the degrees you have is what now stands in for being in the aristocracy. There is a lot of cultural status there and a good deal of it is done for that reason ...it also shows that you either 1) had the money to support yourself while you got all those degrees, or 2) your employer valued you so much that they kept sending you to school. We would jokingly introduce those guys as Doctors ... as in, "and this is Doctors Martin Richter."

 

[LizzieMaine]

We had a Ph. D at our popcorn counter once.

Whether we call it physical work or not, programming and many other jobs, can be very hard on the body! Harder than some "trades" occasionally.

While I'm supposedly a "manager" and even an "executive" for purposes of exempting me from U. S. Overtime Law (hah), I'd estimate that at least half my job is physical work -- running up and down three flights of stairs, climbing ladders, wrestling with machinery, dismantling and rebuilding seats, carrying crates and boxes of supplies, shoveling snow, painting and patching walls, and so on into the night. Job titles in this day and age are utterly meaningless in many lines of work -- it's what they can squeeze out of you, unless you've got the protection of a written contract or a good union behind you.

 

[JimWagner]

Whether we call it physical work or not, programming and many other jobs, can be very hard on the body! Harder than some "trades" occasionally.

True. Pulling cables under floors, installing servers, running wiring were in my duties at one time or another. Carpel tunnel injuries are common with programmers. Then there's the effects of accumlated stress from working under arbitrarily short development schedules in an "zero defects" environment. We used to kid as mainframe systems programmers that no one knew what or how much we did until the system crashed. Invisible or everyone looking at us - no middle ground. On call 24/7 years on end. 60 hour work weeks. And then you have to constantly re-educate yourself or get left behind because the technology changes rapidly. Yesterday's mainframe programmer, today's Unix programmer. I long ago lost count of just how many programming languages I've learned and used. Did I mention the stress?

 

[sheeplady]

Reasonable accommodations can be made in most cases in those types of professions. I've known programmers with cerebral palsy and one whom used a wheelchair.

Is it easy? No. But while you might have to find a new job (perhaps more desk bound), you would not purely be disabled out by ending up in a wheelchair, with no employable skills.

I'd encourage any of my children who studied a trade to get an associates. You can land a halfway decent job with an associates doing office work. It's hell to fight to get disability and most of the people I've known who have been disabled out of their careers are devestated by their inability to work.

The world's not predictable, best to be prepared.

 

[Fading Fast]

A few thoughts and a question:

I have done physical labor, have great respect for it, and would do it again in a minute if I needed to do it to pay the bills: but in every single field I've ever worked in, management, intellectual capital, call it what you want, using your mind and not your brawn pays better.

Even electricians, plumbers etc. - and I was a nanosecond away from being an electrician - who want to "do better," i.e., make more money, become, essentially, managers of electricians or plumbers who work for them. They run a business, solicited customers, drives business plans, solve the problems and "crises," manage employees. Sure they are plumbers, electricians - and they show up in their Carhartt or Dickie clothes - but they rarely turn the screw, pull the wire, etc., they are managers. And I've noticed the same in the charities I've been involved in and the government employees I've interacted with. Think about the Soviet Union, it wasn't the comrade, it was the Party leader who lived better.

So, is it that strategy work - using your mind more than your physical abilities - is truly more valuable, a rarer skill to have or just a manipulation by the people who have it that consistently and across fields and ideology allow intellectual work to pay more than physical work?

 

[LizzieMaine]

So, is it that strategy work - using your mind more than your physical abilities - is truly more valuable, a rarer skill to have or just a manipulation by the people who have it that consistently and across fields and ideology allow intellectual work to pay more than physical work?

It's merely that the artificial construct we call "Society" currently values it more, that's all. Imagine an "Earth Abides" situation where the human population is reduced by, say, 95 percent due to a superplague. Doctors and pharmacists would still be important, because their skill is an intrinsic necessity in any social order. But there would be no need whatsoever for lawyers or bankers. None. On the other hand farmers, butchers, and people with mechanical or carpentry skills would be essential to what few survivors remained.

The specific example in "Earth Abides" is quite interesting -- the book's main character, Isherwood Williams, is a young ecology student who fancies himself quite the intellectual. But other than standing around talking, he actually offers very little practical skill to the settlement of survivors where he lives. He becomes their "leader" because he was the first one living there, but offers no practical leadership other than ideas that never actually get implemented because nobody takes him all that seriously. The real, essential work is done by a middle-aged carpenter who Ish considers "dull and stodgy" and "stupid," but who nonetheless has the skills required to maintain the physical environment where the survivors live. When the carpenter dies, the houses in which the survivors are living gradually fall to pieces, and by the end of the book the settlement has devolved to an illiterate hunter-gatherer society living in caves.

It's not that Ish doesn't try to pass along the value of "intellect." He has a son who he tries to teach to read and understand history and science -- but when that son dies in a typhoid outbreak, none of the other children in the community can see any value in the things Ish is trying to teach them, because they're more concerned with the skills needed for basic survival. Knowing about abstract intellectual concepts has little or no value in such a basic society as they were becoming. They only have value in our current society because we agree, as a society, that they do.

It's the same way that money has value, or "precious metals" have value, or shiny rocks have value, or Mickey Mantle bubblegum cards have value, or social status has value -- because we, as a society, agree that they do. None of these items, in and of themselves, have any actual, intrinsic value at all.

 

[JimWagner]

Well, I have to live in the real world and not a limited fantasy world designed to make a point.

In the real world I've been a worker bee and a manager. One of the things I learned through experience is that most people both need and want leadership. They do not want to be the one who makes decisions. Just as a football team needs a quarterback, groups of people working together need a leader to coordinate what they do. In every case (that I've seen) where that has been replaced by a matrix type of management it has ultimately failed. If concensus cannot be reached then someone has to make a decision. Matrix situations are great for avoiding responsibility for decisions but not so good at quick decision making.

Most people do not want to formally evaluate the performance of others and deal with all the other HR issues. People problems are almost always more difficult to deal with than worker bee problems.

So I'd say that actual line management is worth more financially to a company simply because it's harder to find people who are really capable of doing the job and not on some kind of power trip. In other words, actual leaders are kind of rare.

After 12 years of managing I was able to return to worker bee programming at my request, which I personally enjoy more. But I don't begrudge good managers a dime of their money.

 

[MikeKardec]

It's merely that the artificial construct we call "Society" currently values it more, that's all. Imagine an "Earth Abides" situation where the human population is reduced by, say, 95 percent due to a superplague. Doctors and pharmacists would still be important, because their skill is an intrinsic necessity in any social order. But there would be no need whatsoever for lawyers or bankers. None. On the other hand farmers, butchers, and people with mechanical or carpentry skills would be essential to what few survivors remained.

The specific example in "Earth Abides" is quite interesting -- the book's main character, Isherwood Williams, is a young ecology student who fancies himself quite the intellectual. But other than standing around talking, he actually offers very little practical skill to the settlement of survivors where he lives. He becomes their "leader" because he was the first one living there, but offers no practical leadership other than ideas that never actually get implemented because nobody takes him all that seriously. The real, essential work is done by a middle-aged carpenter who Ish considers "dull and stodgy" and "stupid," but who nonetheless has the skills required to maintain the physical environment where the survivors live. When the carpenter dies, the houses in which the survivors are living gradually fall to pieces, and by the end of the book the settlement has devolved to an illiterate hunter-gatherer society living in caves.

It's not that Ish doesn't try to pass along the value of "intellect." He has a son who he tries to teach to read and understand history and science -- but when that son dies in a typhoid outbreak, none of the other children in the community can see any value in the things Ish is trying to teach them, because they're more concerned with the skills needed for basic survival. Knowing about abstract intellectual concepts has little or no value in such a basic society as they were becoming. They only have value in our current society because we agree, as a society, that they do.

It's the same way that money has value, or "precious metals" have value, or shiny rocks have value, or Mickey Mantle bubblegum cards have value, or social status has value -- because we, as a society, agree that they do. None of these items, in and of themselves, have any actual, intrinsic value at all.

I think you've nailed the basic tension in the divide between information and industrial economies ... or something like that, I'm trying to come up with better terminology but so far failing. However, a person in either group would likely have some experience in the other, just in my life, I've worked with executive types who had mechanical skills that were out of this world ... that was their hobby that kept the pressure of their careers from killing them. Much of the time if you want to find a real expert, find a hobbyist ... they do it for love and they are often extraordinary. I'd say, yes, those characters were designed to make a certain point ...

BUT ...

There certainly is a demographic out there that are those pure intellectuals or academics who constantly engage the world in theory, in the abstract. Universities have been telling them that the future is theirs because that is the world you live in on a lot of campuses and many (maybe even most) professors have spent little time in the "civilian world." One of the things that makes me the most afraid of these people is that they have a fear of the can-do types who have practical skills, and seem to feel like they are dangerous is some way. They are an offense to those who would have "experts" with some sort of certification or other running everything (of course your academic types are in charge of creating those certifications. Too much education is all about criticizing rather than doing. If you can criticize using impenetrable academic language you are brilliant, but the person who can fix the thing is just a mechanic. What we have to realize is that many of these mechanics are executive types, managers and the like ... not every problem only requires a wrench.

I worry that all the various "studies" studies have little use other than to discipline the mind and hone the craft of the essay. As a person who has dealt with the dirtiest and most practical aspects of literature and film his whole life, I find it hysterical to listen to many English students and professors and film "studies" types discuss the "meaning" of one issue or another as if they knew how the creator approached it or as if they were somehow speaking for the whole audience. If they say, "It made me think 'X'" that is totally valid but, in general writers think English professors are hysterical. But, in this case, the writer's are the tradesmen.

 

[Edward]

I imagine most of that "grades they think they deserve" stuff came directly from shallow, status-obsessed parents who raised them that way.

Partly. It also seems, for some, that increasing fees breed a notion that they are entitled to more and more, up to, and including, an entitlement to pass. On the rare occasion I get one of *those*, I take great pleasure in puncturing that inflated notion.

 

[JimWagner]

I worry that all the various "studies" studies have little use other than to discipline the mind and hone the craft of the essay. As a person who has dealt with the dirtiest and most practical aspects of literature and film his whole life, I find it hysterical to listen to many English students and professors and film "studies" types discuss the "meaning" of one issue or another as if they knew how the creator approached it or as if they were somehow speaking for the whole audience. If they say, "It made me think 'X'" that is totally valid but, in general writers think English professors are hysterical. But, in this case, the writer's are the tradesmen.

There's a great scene in the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School where Rodney's character has just flunked an English paper analyzing why Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote something a certain way. His teacher really blasted him and explained just what motivated Vonnegut. Rodney, who had paid to have the paper written by someone else, then thows it in Kurt Vonnegut's face demanding his money back. Priceless. And a rare cameo by Vonnegut.

 

[MikeKardec]

There's a great scene in the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School where Rodney's character has just flunked an English paper analyzing why Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote something a certain way. His teacher really blasted him and explained just what motivated Vonnegut. Rodney, who had paid to have the paper written by someone else, then thows it in Kurt Vonnegut's face demanding his money back. Priceless. And a rare cameo by Vonnegut.

We humans are the animals who see patterns in everything. Those patterns are interesting and worthy of comment just as long as we retain our humility about where they came from!

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Partly. It also seems, for some, that increasing fees breed a notion that they are entitled to more and more, up to, and including, an entitlement to pass. On the rare occasion I get one of *those*, I take great pleasure in puncturing that inflated notion.

I seem to recall reading about at least one university who had actually experienced increased enrollment after hiking up the tuition.

 

[GHT]

I ended up eventually with a 40 year career as a computer programmer but I respect those people who choose for whatever reasons to work with their hands.

My paternal grandfather, a gifted and intelligent man, but without the wherewithal to higher education, died young, from a lung disease caused by working as a coal miner. He did that because it paid the best for manual labour. Granddad died before I was born, but my Dad told me that the coroner told him that Granddad's lungs were black from the coal dust. Decades later I learned that long before smoking killed you, physicians actually encouraged the habit to patients who worked down the pit. The medical consensus being that smoking was an antidote to coal miner's lung.

 

[Edward]

I seem to recall reading about at least one university who had actually experienced increased enrollment after hiking up the tuition.

Yep, it's about perceived value. A few years ago here in the UK, government restructuring of how higher education is financed included raising the cap on fees from £3K per annum to £9K per annum, allowing universities to raise what they charged by up to treble. Obviously the very big names were able to do this confidently as they'll always get the numbers, and then everyone else raised their to the max too so as not to appear to be the cheap option. It's something to do with consumer psychology. Gibson guitars, back in the eighties, went thorugh a period where they couldn't sell a Les Paul for love nor money. The management changed, the new boss doubled the price of LPs, branded then a luxury item, and sales went through the roof. I've also herd in business circles that Gucci almost bombed out twenty years ago by putting the brand on too many things, and losing the perception of exclusivity. Increble thing, the human capacity to be bamboozled by a sales pitch!

My paternal grandfather, a gifted and intelligent man, but without the wherewithal to higher education, died young, from a lung disease caused by working as a coal miner. He did that because it paid the best for manual labour. Granddad died before I was born, but my Dad told me that the coroner told him that Granddad's lungs were black from the coal dust. Decades later I learned that long before smoking killed you, physicians actually encouraged the habit to patients who worked down the pit. The medical consensus being that smoking was an antidote to coal miner's lung.

It's amazing how medical ideas have changed. I'm preparing to teach advertising regulation tomorrow. At this time of year, I'm always reminded of those tv ads for cigarettes from the fifites - you know the one with the surgeon and the "After a hard day doing heart surgery, I like to smoke to relax." Mindbogglingly from today's pov...

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's a story that King George VI was encouraged to smoke by his speech therapist, because it would supposedly help his stammer. His Majesty took that advice, developed lung cancer, and died of a coronary at the age of 56.

 

[philosophygirl78]

I teach at a small university in Mississippi... I have become more and more jaded with the quality of the students here. For the most part, they have such a high sense of entitlement... expect to do little and are aghast when they don't get the high grades they believe they deserve.

A few years ago, I had a young man in some of my classes from Germany... and he was a delight... He was smart... he was challenging... at times I feared the questions he would ask during class. He always scored the highest grades on exams and assignments.

I asked him one day why it was that he was at our small school in Mississippi, and not at one of the bigger schools in Europe. His reply was 'my grades weren't high enough.' His answer just blew me away. It was their way, though, of making sure that candidates were available for those jobs and careers that did not require a college education.

~shoes~

A few of the first undergrad course I took while still in high school were on a Pass / Fail basis. I did so on purpose, not because I couldn't score the grades (my overall undergrad GPA is 3.8), I did so because I was more interested in learning than in receiving some idealized merit of a letter... It served me well. In fact, doing so is partly what steered me towards a philosophy major rather than a physics concentration.

The point? : University Education today has centered OFF actual learning toward a capitalist portfolio of 'grades'. Yes, grades are important, but they are not the purpose behind true education. And you hit the nail on the head as to one of the reasons for the "Decay" in the title.... This off track focus is partly what lends to the "entitlement" you refer to, imho...

I studied at Charles University in Prague for a year, and also in Italy and Spain, and while yes, their standards of college level classes are more rigorous in content than ours here in the US, they are still faltering in similar ways as the American University system. Its a world wide decay in Education.... With a very clear future...

 

[philosophygirl78]

The resources for knowledge are free and plentiful for those who want to learn outside of an institution.

I totally agree with these statements However one needs to be mindful that in order to obtain a Job that pays beyond Poverty Standards, 20K Yr, a College/University Degree is absolutely necessary unless Family connected....
Back in the Day...when I graduated HS it was really easy to Plot the Future, it was "On to College" or "Automotive Apprenticeship" or "Military"....
Nowadays...????????????

For the most part, yes, you are right.... There are exceptions of course, to every rule... To add, most of the 'rags to riches' stories you hear of on the media, they all have some sort of very strong educational baseline. Shark Tank 'sharks' on CNBC is a Perfect example.... O'Leary,. John and Cuban all have a very strong Finance education and background.

 

[philosophygirl78]

Another aspect that displays just how decayed the education system worldwide has become is the perception that comes along with the various labor sectors.... One would imagine that humane adherence to jobs would be taught across society in the 21st century.... I simply do not understand why it is a notion that the factory worker is not as ethically valuable as the fund money manager...

This is different now, than attributing a fiscal value, or salary to a profession; which is an entirely new thread of discussion, and one probably worth opening.

Personally, my garbageman and mailman are two people I value the most in my life, after family and friends...