“One future that will be unimaginable for its students is understanding Latin. “Unfamiliar” to them will be the … self-understanding that comes through linguistic and literary knowledge of the language at the root of their own.”

English is a Germanic language, not Italic.

Anyway, Indian and Chinese grads, willing to work for $300 a month, are pretty much going to wipe the floor with American grads, who can’t read or write. Besides, Americans are often saddled with a half million dollars in debt by the time they get out – while the Indian taxpayer has absorbed the bill for them.

I really appreciate the views I’ve found here, btw. I’d come to conflate “conservative” with knuckle heads like Ann Coulter. It’s refreshing to find so much common ground and reasonable speech!

Yes, those new-fangled “computer science” degrees will get you nowhere!

qed

A few summers a go, to pay for my grad school, I was working summers in landscaping. I ran into three or four young guys that summer, all of whom had dropped out of college for the exact reasons you discuss here. College was stupid. Ridiculous. They had no interest in it whatsoever. Probably to their credit. One had even dropped out of engineering school and enrolled in a union-operated machinist program. Another, who had never declared a major, had dropped out to become a plumber’s apprentice. Another was running a crew for a wall-anchoring business. All of these guys were hard chargers, doing really well and learning a ton of cool stuff at the age of 19-22. They smoked and drank a lot, ran with loose women, and drove cars that cost too much, but at least they were paying for it themselves.

Not sure where they are now. With the economy in the tank, I am assuming they got laid off, and are now following government programs that insist the best way forward is to stop learning these things and go to college. Maybe they will all major in womens studies or sociology and the world will be more just because of it.

Maybe not.

As for idiocy – yeah – idiocy abounds but seriously – has there ever been some glorious time when idiocy didn’t run rampant? So our system of education has given us the income tax – well – previous systems gave us WWI, WWII, and even – phrenology! I’m tempted to add the enlightenment to that list but enlightenment bashing is becoming so cliche nowadays. I am giving up on the search for 100% intelligent life on this planet – humans are clearly prone to idiocy.

Now I would agree that idiocy at Universities in the past is easier to tolerate than the stuff one has to deal with every day. So yes – there is much to be disgusted by in the current system. I am getting very suspicious though of reform proposals – it occurs to me that part of why we have such a mess now is because we had such a fervor for educational reform in the 70′s.

Part of my loss of faith in reform comes from the observation that every time we implement some grand solution to our discontents – we simply create new problems. The indebtedness of undergrads seems a good example. Some schools (naming no names here) now refuse to do loans for undergrads – providing only grants. The problem though is that only those elite schools with big endowments can afford this sort of thing so we risk – if the trend continues – a situation wherein we have a two tiered system – kids who can get into the wellendowed schools will have no/little debt versus kids who end up in less fortunate schools will continue to have piles of debt. Which is worse – everyone has piles of debt or some have piles of debt?

I suspect that the rush towards everyone going to college was an attempt to obscure the fact that there simply were no longer sufficient decent paying jobs for all those 18 – 22 year olds. Four years of college keeps em out of the unemployment stats. Part of the dilemna now is that it is becoming clear that the BA doesn’t help you get a decent job but there aren’t a whole lot of decent jobs for skilled labor either. People will turn more towards skilled labor type training as opposed to college when the opportunities for such jobs are there.

And despite all the high tech – I agree – most kids cannot even format a document.