The dumbing down theory

gumboot said:
The only time I've ever seen a plumber even remotely "drenched to the waist in other people's feces" is in lame American comedies.

Plumbers here get paid better than doctors, and most of what they're doing is clean and relatively straight forward. Same for electricians.

I'd rather be debt free and replacing the washer on someone's tap for $100 an hour than making someone's hamburger for $10 an hour so I can pay off my $20,000 loan for my worthless degree.
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I'm driving with a cable sniffer instead of flipping burgers, but my $50,000 student loan debt and I wish we'd met you earlier.
 
quixotecoyote said:
I'm driving with a cable sniffer instead of flipping burgers, but my $50,000 student loan debt and I wish we'd met you earlier.
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A lot of that depends on where you are. It's extremely difficult to get a plumbng license in Chicago for example. It's not just taking a test, before you even do that you have to work as an apprentice for a licensed plumber for 8 years, and then said licensed plumber has to give you permission to, basically, compete with him. And unless he's a relative or close friend, it's unlikely he'll sign off. So most plumbing contractors have to pay a licensed plumber to use his license, which is necessary to pull a permit. And Chicago requires a permit to do just about anything, including just changing the faucet on a bathroom vanity. So the reality is most of the time no one bothers with a permit (unless you want to pay an extra $200-$1,000 for no good reason) unless it's a city violation in which case you're screwed and will have to get a permit.

It's quite a racket. But it's very easy to make over 6 figures if you do have a plumbing license.
 
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gumboot said:
Personally I think this is a direct consequence of western society placing an unrealistic value on tertiary education. Once upon a time, it wasn't seen as a necessary step in education except for specific academic-orientated subjects and things such as lawyering, doctoring, engineering, and so forth.

The overwhelming majority who didn't go to university weren't seen as inferior in any way.

Then something shifted. I don't know how it happened, or why, but over time the view became that tertiary education was vitally important, and soon it was accepted as a matter of course that you had to go. Suddenly a whole vast population of students left high school and went straight into university, not because they wanted to or because their chosen field or work required it, but because it was expected of everyone.

These people, who didn't belong at university and didn't really want to be there, needed subjects to interest them, so you get a change in the sort of courses made available. One tertiary institute here now offers, I've noticed, a THREE YEAR full degree course for the job of... wait for it...

Flight Attendant

WTF?

Now these people come out with worthless degrees and can't find work because they haven't picked up useful employable skills they traditionally would have acquired from leaving school and going into an apprenticeship system.

Meanwhile the influx of students has devalued a degree severely so that those who really did need to do tertiary study find their hard effort and careful study was basically a waste of time.
And all the while there's no one going out of school any more and taking up a trade because if you haven't been to university you're some sort of social pariah retard. Some polytechs offer courses in these technical trades but formal education was never the best place to learn that sort of skill and as such they're coming out with worthless pieces of paper because they don't really know what they're doing. As a result the traditional work for those non-university types is suffering a severe manpower shortage; plumbers, electricians, builders, and so forth.

New Zealand, as example, has only about one thousand master plumbers serving a population of four million! And most of those plumbers are either very close to or actually over retirement age. (A couple of years back my parents had to get a plumber in to do a gas fitting. He was over 70 and working on Christmas Eve (had a full day's work booked) and told my parents he wanted to retire, but his work were so desperate to retain him due to lack of replacement that they basically just increased his fee until he couldn't say no).
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I agree. Colleges uses to either be more selective or select from a more highly qualified group. Not only that, but as you say, the people that went to college were motivated to learn. Thus the group that did graduate were very highly respected.

People looked at my father with a great deal of respect because he was a college graduate. Now, so what? People are probably more likely to call you an idiot if you know something that they don't. A useful college degree means people today think you are an idiot - unless you agree with the (their) vogue conventional 'wisdom'.
 
Quad4_72 said:
I think unschooling is the way to go....
www.unschooling.com

And by "The way to go", I mean "Absolutely the OPPOSITE way to go"...
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I believe there is some truth to that. I believe that the vogue conventional wisdom is 50% incorrect and should be un-learned.

I think that we should teach people how to exchange ideas and not insults or logical fubars (logical fallacies).

We should exchange truths and ideas, not bullets.

We should also need to be taught to appreciate what truth and logic are and not to insult, stone or shoot every messenger of truth (don't shoot me, I'm only the messenger...)
 
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Pencil-pushing desk-jockeys don't seem to understand that some folks enjoy working with their hands. They can't imagine that anyone would actually choose manual labour rather than just settling for it.

I guess it works out well for me. That's why I make more than my sister with her master's degree (and thousands of dollars of student loan debt.)
 
Quad4_72 said:
I think unschooling is the way to go....
www.unschooling.com

And by "The way to go", I mean "Absolutely the OPPOSITE way to go"...
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I can't really parse out your opinion from that. Are you saying that people should go in the opposite way, and that unschooling is the way to do so, or are you saying that people should go in the opposite way from unschooling?

I do approve of unschooling, by the way. I was partially educated that way and turned out fine. I hope to give the same gift to my own kids some day.
 
Andrew Wiggin said:
I can't really parse out your opinion from that. Are you saying that people should go in the opposite way, and that unschooling is the way to do so, or are you saying that people should go in the opposite way from unschooling?

I do approve of unschooling, by the way. I was partially educated that way and turned out fine. I hope to give the same gift to my own kids some day.
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I mean I completely disagree with it. If you "unschool" your kids all the way through high school, how the hell are they going to get into a college or get a job?
 
Quad4_72 said:
I mean I completely disagree with it. If you "unschool" your kids all the way through high school, how the hell are they going to get into a college or get a job?
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I was 'unschooled', and I got into college. In fact, I got into a pretty decent college, on full scholarship, where I completed a couple of degrees. Afterwards I had no problem at all getting a job. It's never handicapped me in the slightest. It has rarely if ever even come up, and then only as a point in my favor. This isn't the problem you're making it out to be.
 
Andrew Wiggin said:
I was 'unschooled', and I got into college. In fact, I got into a pretty decent college, on full scholarship, where I completed a couple of degrees. Afterwards I had no problem at all getting a job. It's never handicapped me in the slightest. It has rarely if ever even come up, and then only as a point in my favor. This isn't the problem you're making it out to be.
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So what did you enter for the requirement of a high school degree to get into college?
 
You know, I wonder if there really is a dumbing down, or a new phenomenon that too many people want to go to college.

I mean, sure, if you look at graduates vs the rest of the population, you may think "OMG, almost a whole third of the population is getting diplomas now", and probably be correct that it's a bigger percentage of the total population than was the case, say, 100 or 200 years ago. No doubt it's true too.

But therein lies the misleading factor: total population.

Some 100 or 200 years ago, most people were not expected to go to college, nor able to even if they wanted to. You could exclude from a start all women (even secondary schools for girls only appear for example in Germany in 1872), and everyone who wasn't at least middle class or higher. By the middle of the 19'th century in Germany for example, almost a third of the total secondary school students came from the upper class, although that class was a small fraction of the total population. The rest just couldn't afford it, and at least some would even be looked down upon if they even tried. (Being a woman who reads books was a symptom of nymphomania, for example.)

Out of those who _were_ sons of nobles and industrialists, I think you'd find _more_ of a pressure and expectation to waste some years at an university than there is now in any western country. Being the son of some noble or rich industrialist and not getting a university education or some private tutoring at home (and by that, I mean hiring some expensive private teachers, not mommy learning arithmetic with you) _was_ very much perceived as a failure in most places. Much more so than if you hear these days that some millionaire's son decided to drop out of university and start some company.

So such comparisons with the past are essentially flawed. They only put less of the total population through the system, because the system wasn't meant for everyone. But out of those wealthy enough to afford it, an extensive education was very much expected and much more of a prestige factor than nowadays.
 
Justinian2 said:
I believe there is some truth to that. I believe that the vogue conventional wisdom is 50% incorrect and should be un-learned.

I think that we should teach people how to exchange ideas and not insults or logical fubars (logical fallacies).

We should exchange truths and ideas, not bullets.

We should also need to be taught to appreciate what truth and logic are and not to insult, stone or shoot every messenger of truth (don't shoot me, I'm only the messenger...)
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Allo Guvnor, sorry to 'ear you 'ad a pork sword up the Prince Albert. Wot's 'appened to the Knox thread, me old mucker? Seems to be shut.
 
I noticed an interesting correlation the other day when I was browsing reviews of a mobile phone app: The amount of dissatisfaction with the product was directly proportional to the use of bad spelling and grammar in the reviews. From this you might conclude several things:

1. Uneducated people are too impatient to figure out how to work the app
2. Uneducated people are too stupid to figure out how to work the app
3. Uneducated people are generally dissatisfied with life and like to complain

(of course, this assumes that there is a link between bad grammar and education.)

It could be that if (1) is true, then lack of education can be tied to impatience...not wanting to study, not wanting to spend four years pursuing an optional level of education.
 
Quad4_72 said:
So what did you enter for the requirement of a high school degree to get into college?
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I think you need to go do some more research. People who homeschool or unschool their kids do so in full accordance with local laws, and the kids are considered high school graduates.
 
gumboot said:
The only time I've ever seen a plumber even remotely "drenched to the waist in other people's feces" is in lame American comedies.

Plumbers here get paid better than doctors, and most of what they're doing is clean and relatively straight forward. Same for electricians.

I'd rather be debt free and replacing the washer on someone's tap for $100 an hour than making someone's hamburger for $10 an hour so I can pay off my $20,000 loan for my worthless degree.
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It wasn't so long ago that plumbers, auto mechanics, and electricians, certainly as we know of those careers today, were unknown or on the frontiers of technology. Come to think of it, the fry cook "career" at a fast food joint is also new enough that it was inconceivable only a couple generations past.

Specialisation and technological impetus have forced a kind of "dumbing down" in that a rough basis for employment choice has to be widely accessible to young people and easy for instructors.

The OP links, by the way, to notorious conspiracy kook Eric Hufschmid who is, among many other things, an Apollo mission hoaxer, a Holocaust denier, and a 9/11 "truther". Nothing he has to say has any merit.
 
aggle-rithm said:
I noticed an interesting correlation the other day when I was browsing reviews of a mobile phone app: The amount of dissatisfaction with the product was directly proportional to the use of bad spelling and grammar in the reviews. From this you might conclude several things:

1. Uneducated people are too impatient to figure out how to work the app
2. Uneducated people are too stupid to figure out how to work the app
3. Uneducated people are generally dissatisfied with life and like to complain

(of course, this assumes that there is a link between bad grammar and education.)

It could be that if (1) is true, then lack of education can be tied to impatience...not wanting to study, not wanting to spend four years pursuing an optional level of education.
Click to expand...

Or, perhaps, Marketing controlled the release date and instruction manual for the app instead of relying on proper product development and focus group testing.
 
Justinian2 said:
I agree. Colleges uses to either be more selective or select from a more highly qualified group. Not only that, but as you say, the people that went to college were motivated to learn. Thus the group that did graduate were very highly respected.

People looked at my father with a great deal of respect because he was a college graduate. Now, so what? People are probably more likely to call you an idiot if you know something that they don't. A useful college degree means people today think you are an idiot - unless you agree with the (their) vogue conventional 'wisdom'.
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I've also noticed that people seem to pass when they shouldn't. My degree course could have been something really valuable and worthwhile, but literally every student who wanted to come back and rack up another year of student loan debt was allowed to. I know of at least four people who graduated with me who failed every single year of the degree, yet somehow still magically passed. Given how much of our course was collaborative and practical, you can imagine how miserable it was when you got assigned to one of these lazy unmotivated ass-hats in your crucial final year projects!

Because the institution cared more about getting those dollars from the government than it did preserving any sort of educational integrity.

In fact, I was so disgusted by the course I didn't even attend my graduation, and have never taken my "piece of paper" out of its envelope. It's totally worthless.
 
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