Captain Aggravated

As adorable as that is, hunger and cold have ways of asserting themselves.

Define “credentialism?”

The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.

Because guess what? That “just technical stuff” is the society we live in. Your ability to put current events into context because you studied the collapse of the Roman Empire won’t stop you from bleeding to death from multiple puncture wounds to the face, throat and chest caused by the rhinestones you glued to the hub of your steering wheel, turning your airbag into a claymore mine. You might not have crashed at all if you’d have taken your car to the shop when it started squealing every time you stepped on the brake pedal, you were relieved when it stopped that on its own.

The amount of staggering stupidity I’ve seen out of allegedly educated people…

“The way to get a job.”

The way to get certain jobs, like doctor, lawyer, scientist, engineer. Professions.

Don’t put education on some kind of pedestal. The very few people who were wealthy enough to attempt that shit had servants. They were rich enough to pursue the capstone of Maslowe’s pyramid. Nearly no one else is. The rest of us require a trade or profession to make ends meet. Until you solve scarcity, one way or another, reject as decadent the image of the angelic lofty scholar who learns for the sake of learning.

I keep saying it about AI written essays, but it applies here: College as we know it is bullshit and I hope this technology sparks the fire that burns it down.

The business model of quasi-requiring all young people to spend 4 years going into massive debt for the privilege of mostly repeating high school needs to die.

This shit about “become a well-rounded individual” also needs to die. That nonsense came about in the mid-20th century when it seemed industry, automation and electrical gadgetry was going to free us of toil, that in the future, George Jetson spends 3 hours a day, 3 days a week putting his feet up on his desk, so schools should teach art and music and literature classes to give people healthy hobbies so they know what to do with all this time they have. Wash that through the baby boomer intellect and it comes out “EXPLAIN THE THEMES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS OR DIE A DITCH DIGGER.”

No such reduction in toil has happened. Artificial, gaseous toil has been created that expands to take up all available time.

We cling to this idea that “You are young. This is school time. You learn until you’re adult. When adult, you stop learn and start work. Never school again only work.” Which is the dumbest thing ever. We should offer all kinds of classes to all ages of people. You should be able to take a sociology class as a 38 year old man as casually as you can take yoga. Formal courses of study should be for earning certifications. You want to fly a plane? You need to complete this entire syllabus and take and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently crash into a neighborhood. You want to be a civil engineer? You need to complete this entire syllabus and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently sign off on a building that will collapse.

Humanities classes, arts and crafts, fine arts, culinary skills…this stuff needs to be available to anyone who wants them and not tacked onto technical training as a way to wring more money out of students.