How can we ever get competent doctors, lawyers, teachers, pastors, engineers, taxi drivers and so on? History gives us some examples.
We can use the apprenticeship model. It still works for carpenters and plumbers. Why could it not work for an engineer. Young people find someone who is willing to invest in them for the future. Lawyers used to get their education reading law in a lawyers office. In the process they probably did some clerking and even swept floors but they learned what they needed to know at the feet of someone they considered qualified. I could never have been a successful blue collar worker. My hands don’t work that way, but I did learn some skills simply by being on the job with my dad and older brother. No one ever sent me to a class on how to change a washer or install a faucet but I have done both.
We can use the medieval model if we are after academic knowledge. The organization was pretty loose. Students went to the classes they wanted and listened to the scholars they thought were worth hearing. Eventually they would be tested on their knowledge. There was no course of study or minimum requirements. And in reality if they wanted to go out and start teaching without the test, who was going to stop them? If they had something to say and people would listen, caveat emptor. Keep in mind that people considered to be educated and highly qualified make some of the stupidest declarations you could imagine. Having a degree does not make you worth listening to.
We can use the Abraham Lincoln model. If my memory is correct Abraham Lincoln spent less than a year total in formal education. Between what he learned at home and his personal desire to study he became one of the most literate presidents we have ever had. He would borrow books and devour them. He took responsibility for his own education. It seemed to work for him, why not for you.
We can use the Frederick Douglass model. He taught himself to read in spite of laws against such a thing. He was a slave. It was illegal to teach a slave to read. It tended to make them aware of the outside world and made them very unreconciled to their position. He would not settle for being someone else’s property. First, he started to educate himself. Then he ran for freedom and kept learning. He should be an inspiration to all those people with degrees in worthless subjects who cannot get a job.
If we don’t do something we will be forced to use the Conan the Barbarian model. That is the plan in which civilized society falls apart and the spoils go to the one with the biggest muscles, fastest reactions and sharpest sword. The barbarians did not create, they destroyed while they enjoyed the fruits of other people’s labor. Sounds like the socialists of today, doesn’t it?
Higher education is not. It is broken. We need to fix it or the barbarians with Ph.D.s will destroy us.
homo unius libri
Agreed. It had already begun to be ridiculous back in the late 1970s when I went to college; I recognized then that getting a degree was all about jumping through required hoops, and that if I wanted to learn anything useful, I mostly had to teach myself. There were occasional useful classes, but the majority were just fillers.
ReplyDeleteAnd I find myself so skeptical that I have a hard time just accepting what anyone says.
DeleteGrace and peace