Is he ready for college? Please, please, say he’s ready!
How hard should your 5-year-old be preparing for [trumpets, please] College?
I didn’t have a bad time in college. Some of it was good. But jumpin’ jehozafat, how much “education” is enough! It starts when you’re four or five years old and is still going when you have a beard. And all it does is prepare you for MORE education!
Took me a long, long time to catch on to the scam.
I’ll have to disagree with you on this one, Lee. No amount of education is ever enough. In fact, my best friend and I wept at our graduation from college because we wouldn’t get to take classes any more unless we went to graduate school. We loved reading and we loved learning, but only in our classes could we get the kind of feedback we needed to keep from stagnating in our own insights and thinking our experiences were the measure of all things. Of course, that was back in the days when high school and college really did give students an education — and I also went to one of the special high schools in New York, where we had to take a test to get in and where learning was a passion.
Well, I just reached a point in life where I felt,very strongly, that there had to be more to life than just sitting in a classroom. Maybe that was a mistake; but I felt I had to try my
wings. Those wings turned out to be insufficient for my needs. Live and learn.
But soon I was a newspaper reporter and editor–and it was very educational.
My niche–and I should’ve known this while I was still in grade school–was to be a writer. It took me many years to find my way into that niche.
Burdening small children with college preparation strikes me as cruel. Yes, children should learn and should be expected to take their learning seriously, but if kindergarten children can’t spare a moment or risk damaging their future, then the system is in need of serious overhaul.
I think most are looking at this issue incorrectly. Education does not mean sitting in a classroom. Although education can be acquired there. And in some classrooms, though you learn many things, you have not been educated. Consider those who have been taught the religion of evolution, they are not educated. They have become truly ignorant in this field of “science” study.
Education Is The Acquisition Of True Wisdom And True Knowledge. And that, should be sought after, all your life.
You make a good point. I do see the need for educational standards, but it’s become a bit of a never ending process, and no matter what degree a person has, there is pressure for even more. I recall looking at government standards for certain networking/system admin positions, some time back and they wanted doctoral level education. That’s ridiculous, they are hiring systems people, not college professors, and the efforts required for that level of credentials would have been better exerted on day to day p, real world tasks, which are well within the reach of anyone with reasonable reading and mathematical skills.
I hired people with reasonable levels of computer skills and could teach them the necessary admin skills relatively quickly, as apprentices. Within a year, they’d be able to work independently on most tasks and if it was something complicated, I’d talk them through, as part of their ongoing training.
One of these fellows did a Bachelor’s in Network Administration and told me that he didn’t really learn anything he hadn’t already learned on the job. I wasn’t particularly surprised. All I am saying is that it didn’t take four years of class work to learn this; just directed instruction.
Whenever I hired anyone, I learned that work history and experience were the best predictors of performance.
There are more things to learn besides technical skills. Education isn’t the same as vocational training.
Gee, I’ve been saying that for years. College IS NOT VO-TECH.
As a newspaper editor, I just hired anyone who seemed really enthusiastic… reckoning I could train them as we went along.. It almost always worked out just fine.