College

The perceived and actual roles of secondary education in the modern industrialized world.

Understanding the real purposes of secondary education requires a mechanism for locating and understanding rules, particularly the absurd one.

Reciprocity is the key to showing the absurdity of any rule.

School is about rules, rules are about power, and power is about double standards. For example, the government can kill, I can not, that's power.

Formal education with regard to actually imparting career specific skill is quickly becoming obsolete in the face of technologies eliminating through automation whole career paths and spawning entirely new ones.

Education is more and more about an aristocratic pass card. A cultural and psychological filter. As many of us know from experience, the vast majority of career skill comes from experience.

College by definition cannot provide experience, it can arrange for experience to be had but but it must always do so through a potential employer. Hence the concept of internship and the death of apprenticeship.

The diplomas which colleges sell are simply membership cards. Actually getting employment is more about personal charisma and physical attractiveness in an interview, who you know that can get you said interview in the first place, or simple experience. Very rarely is it about skill acquired directly through formal education. This is not shocking given the vague nature of most education and the dated nature of specific education. Academia again by definition will always adapt more slowly than the market, since its job is to respond to the responses of the market.

If college were actually about job skills, companies would ignore diplomas generally and issue industry specific tests directly to prospective employees, indeed many do. They would have test proctoring centers where companies could even charge for tests to cover costs and motivate independent study. As it turns out they can charge quite a lot given the cost of a traditional diploma. Some companies have ended up acquiring more profit from selling training than their original business model. This was the genesis of the certification market.

The reason we still have formal secondary education is, for the most part, cultural stagnation and elitism plain and simple. Much like why we have such a fetish for abstract math classes, which is a cultural echo of a time not so long ago when computers simply didn't exist while colleges most certainly did.

Medical school and the physical sciences are potential exceptions, but they are far from perfect. The sciences are becoming quite cult/religion like as the volume of data demands greater and greater time investment and specialization to even grasp, much less contribute to.

Student government by and large is there to pacify and isolate students who labor under the misconception that the purpose of "education" is to impart career skills beyond coping mechanisms. It is also there to insulate the college administration from any cries of inequity for persons outside the university also laboring under that said misconception. As with protest the real purpose ironically is exactly the opposite of what is claimed.

Colleges don't sell education anymore so much as they collect a cover charge. And employers typically ask for a degree not out of a search for any specific knowledge, but to find a certain kind of person. IE one who is willing to submit to an authority regardless of its ineptitude for long periods of time on the promise of money.

Did you ever notice how being in a Fraternity or Sorority equals in many cases better chances in the job market? Why does being tortured by more senior students, and showing a willingness to torture those "below" you play any role in college what so ever? Because that is exactly what is required of a successful Corporate employee above and beyond any skill, which as I said can be acquired later through experience.

College is more about reeducation, then education.

This is why the military is hard on new soldiers above and beyond the physical requirements of training. The psychological habit of submitting to authority, without asking questions or complaining about perceived stupidity, is required for any complex institution to survive when its purposes are so complex as to be impossible for an individual to fully learn. Employees in such a group that stopped work or slowed down to demand answers would constitute an escalating counter productive force. One that would spread as more employees ask questions once they are exposed to them, given either innate human curiosity, or more likely the delusion that what they are doing is supposed to be personally understood.

So asking questions, spreads and causes institutional dysfunction. Sound familiar? The effect is basically institutional cancer. (unions are chemotherapy) Thus institutions have a vested interest, proportional to their size or complexity, in finding employees who obey without asking questions.

And college is about filtering out those people to produce a refined crop of intelligent but fundamentally uninquisitive automatons.

These facts are why formal secondary education is devolving into a mindless, byzantine, frat house, dating service, basketball camp, caste system, organized by familial income tier.