The CNN is stupid, of course, but sometimes it invites interesting people to utter a couple of sentences. On Sunday, there was this gentleman with the unfortunate last name of Gopnik who spoke very well about the Humanities.
Gopnik said that Obama’s tiresome spiel about not everybody needing a college degree because for some folks learning mechanical skills will be enough to make a living is profoundly classist.
“This will place everybody in their own box, like streamline everything,” Fareed Zakaria whelped happily. “Like in Germany where everybody is in their own class and there is no unemployment as a result.”
The intelligent Gopnik fellow whose last name tells us that his family line benefited enormously from the cocnept of social mobility explained that locking some people into a box where nothing but their physical strength and their stomachs will ever be utilized is hardly fair.
It is, indeed, curious that people who assure us that one can do perfectly well in life based on nothing more than mechanical skills all go to Harvard, live in mansions, and wouldn’t know a hammer from their elbow. Something tells me that Obama is not making the same “not everybody needs college” speeches to his daughters.
Clarissa's Blog 
Unfortunately the trained monkeys that are your everyday human being have learned to mouth the idea that they do not need to know more than they do because knowledge is pretension and elitist, so in many ways they were getting back an echo of their own hopes and aspirations of not having to go through a grueling education process that would put their naive assumptions under scrutiny. In general, politicians are opportunists who give you what you think you want — often by taking away what you really need.
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The last sentence of your comment is exactly what I’m saying. Obama doesn’t want to reestablish the Pell grants for poorstudents to attend college. He prefers to give this money to his corporate cronies to ensure that his kids and grandkids will get the best education and jobs in the world.
And the idiots he’s robbing are moaning in delight.
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The easiest way to destroy somebody is to give them what they think they want.
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I have several buddies who have highschool education or less who will probably make considerably more money in their lifetime than most so called “educated” people. 🙂
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And you should feel absolutely free to promote this plan to your daughter.
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I dont with her because she is wired for formal education. With her smarts I wont be surprised if she gets a full ride to a university. My son on the other hand is a different kind of learner and will probably be the one taking care of us in our old age. 😉
The idea that formal education is the only way to go is very short sighted.
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“I dont with her because she is wired for formal education. With her smarts I wont be surprised if she gets a full ride to a university. ”
– Exactly as I expected. 🙂
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She is probably like you. Really freaking smart. 🙂
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thank you. 🙂
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Are you going to be up Ottawa way in March?
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Well not everybody is cut out for college (by aptitude and/or temprement).
Ideally, it should be the person’s choice about whether to attend (or finish) college and it would be nice if there were dignified and viable ways to make a living without a post seconary degree.
But those in a position to make such decisions seem determined to destroy the semi-skilled middle class in favor of a pseudo-caste system, with a small elite and great masses of have nots and as little social cohesion as possible.
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The problem isn’t that everyone is or is not cut out for college, the problem is that the people “not cut out for college” are always other people’s kids.
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That’s what happens when you get parents fighting for prestige through their children. As I said, if people (no matter what their parents say) decide for themselves whether or not to start (or finish) college they would be better off (if there were more viable non-college career paths).
There’s also the fact that governments in a lot of the world use expanding credentialism (wanting people to stay in school longer) primarily to keep them out of the unemployment figures. When there’s no entry level jobs for potential graduates you keep them from graduating.
I needed to go to college primarily out of intellectual curiosity reasons (employment? career? ha!) my brother didn’t. He finished the equivalent of very advanced vocational training (in a field that’s extraordinarily hard to get into, both in terms of training and then catching a career break when you finish) and that was absolutely right for him.
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In my mother’s generation, all three of her sisters were discouraged from going to college by their parents and the other adults in their lives, like high school teachers. They were told to consider secretarial or beauty school, or farmwork. Later in life, my three aunts went to college in their late 40s, and got degrees in fields they were always enthusiastic about but never had the encouragement to pursue.
People really need to realize that this rhetoric doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and think carefully about who gets told they should be content with a trade or a low-skill job.
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“People really need to realize that this rhetoric doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and think carefully about who gets told they should be content with a trade or a low-skill job.”
– That’s exactly what I’m saying.
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@lady
Its not about being content with certain jobs. Its about skill set. University and or College is not in everyone’s skill set. Helping out the one’s who recognize this is paramount rather than making them feel like failures for not being able to navigate the other.
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” Its about skill set. University and or College is not in everyone’s skill set.”
– If people graduate from high school with the degree of illiteracy that makes them incapable of attending college, the president of that country should do something to improve secondary education instead of saying, “Noah, it’s perfectly fine for SOME people to be illiterate.”
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