It’d be hard to find a more glaring example of ingratitude; but it’s one of those things you pick up when you shed your Christianity.
The secular worldview being wrong, a secular education can’t help being wrong, too. I was once excoriated by a PBS watcher who claimed to be teaching “critical thinking” to her two-year-old… to keep the child from being hornswoggled by the Bible.
So much nicer to be hornswoggled by a teachers’ union!
I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be a youngster entering a secular college, these days. Even “Christian” colleges are not a lead-pipe cinch that you will be spared being exposed to wokeness.
We really do need to realize that not that many people need college.
College would be great, if it really were college. I’d love to pursue an MSEE, but I don’t want to be forced to sit through indoctrination of social notions of the Left.
It took me many years, and God’s grace, to outgrow college.
DeProgramming takes a lot of time.
I had an excellent college education at both universities that I attended (I transferred in my sophomore year). One was a state university (U of Utah) and the second was a private one (NYU-Heights, not to be confused with the ahem inferior main campus downtown where, as we used to say, our dropouts and flunkouts went to finish). There were rigorous courses, excellent professors – almost entirely male, by the way – and dedicated students at both. Of course there were also slackers at the larger state university, but on the whole I had, as I’ve said, an excellent education. And yes, I did find the education useful in my careers afterward, even though none of my courses were career specific. Career-specific courses are called “training,” not “education.”
Pardon the rant. I get tired of hearing that college as a category is dangerous or useless, and/or that a college education should be about getting someone a good job. In fact, I often suspect that those who see college as an advanced vocational school didn’t learn much when they were in college, maybe even avoiding those courses that weren’t about something they were already familiar with. But then again, my college experience was in the late 1950s and very early 1960s. It was a different world then.
That’s a key point. College isn’t what it used to be. When I was a child, I would meet college educated adults and be impressed by the fact that they were well-read, well-spoken and obviously possessed of deeper knowledge than the average person.
These days, advanced degrees are commonplace and I’ve spoken to persons with a Master’s Degree whom were anything but well-spoken. I’ve heard grammar out of Master’ holders which wouldn’t have passed muster in my third grade classroom.
Vocational schools have their place. A friend of my finished his bachelor’s, then when to a vocational school for less than 18 months. He compared that vocational school to about 3 years of college. Actually, I can think of a number of college educated people that ended up taking vocational training, after getting their degree.
One of the problems with modern college education is that many paths do not prepare you for useful employment. I recently spoke to a physician that started with a degree in Biology, but could only find a job as a retail manager. It wasn’t a total loss, because his Biology degree was enough to get him into medical school, but how many people are out there that never were able to convert their education into marketable skills? If someone is walking around with a fantastic education, that alone will not allow you to build a life.
There is a fellow of my acquaintance that had a Master’s as a Civic Planner. To quote him directly; “I have nothing”, and he was right. He had no practical skill. He once was asked to take a look at a piece of property to assess its suitability as a homesite, but had no idea of what to do. He called upon me, and I have zero background in Civic Planning, because he didn’t even have a notion of what to look for. I glanced around; figured out where the power and telephone were running, then pointed out a few other things about the property and left, having saved his backside, because his job was literally on the line had he not completed this assessment. What was my qualification? I had once held an entry level job at an electric utility and at least knew what I was looking at.
This may seem a well-chosen example, but such a situation is far from unique. I recently worked with a project manager on a telecomm project, and his opening words were; “I don’t know anything about telephones”. He was nothing but a waste of time in this project, adding nothing, but wasting an incredible number of man hours on meetings which accomplished nothing. The people who actually had the work of planning the project would meet privately and complete their tasks in a matter of minutes. The project was quite successful because the people involved were knowledgeable and experienced. The professional project manager felt good about his contribution, and never realized that his net contribution was to waste valuable time.
I have seen this with many recent graduates, who will cross every “t” and dot every “i”, but don’t know how to actually make something useful happen. College, these days, has become something far different from what it was decades ago. The last 20 years, especially, have seen a disastrous decline in what the colleges offer.
Phoebe, I hope you never thought I was demeaning your college career. In fact, I liked the scholarly aspect of it. I’m sure I was only one of a very few students who enjoyed defending his thesis (“A Political Analysis of the Viking Age”). Too bad nobody thought to bring potato chips and root beer.
What I had to outgrow was not Art History, Dante, English Comedy, Geology 202, or any of my other courses. What I had to outgrow was the sophomoric ancillary people’s liberation horse****. I got a full dose of it at Rutgers and at Michigan State.
I never thought of college as a vocational school, and I never expected that a course on Dante would put a dime in my pocket. But I don’t need to tell you what a course like that is worth. Especially when the prof is a genuine enthusiast. His students loved him for it.
I was graduated in 1971, so your college world was somewhat different from mine. I was good at the scholarship part. It was all the rest of it that I had to shed.