Part three of my running rant regarding the issues of higher education (see parts
[ONE] and
[TWO]). Figured I'd do this one as a free-verse poem (yes, I realize there was some rhyming in there. Honestly it wasn't intentional, and I was too angry when writing it to even attempt an honest rhyming schema anyway).
The two lines in Latin at the end were generously translated for me by my current roommate. The English version is "The purpose of learning is not for school, but for life."
Let's face some facts, here. Outside of academia is there any
value in knowing how to write a twelve page research paper with a minimum of ten sources? Of reading through two full Norton Anthologies on Victorian Literature in a single semester? Of producing absolutely gigantic projects and presentations on topics that, once you've graduated, will probably be nothing more than a painful memory? They say that a man wrapped up in himself is a very small package, but when an educational system does it what you get is a gigantic bureaucracy with professors who only have jobs because students are expected to take their classes,
not because their work contributes anything useful to society. Education, like American finance, is rapidly becoming a pseudo-system based on values that we're
told exist yet amount to virtually nothing long-term. It's about time someone took a long, hard, Socratic look at higher academics and started trimming the fat.
Comments
Fieryone Says:
My god, this is one piece of poetry I ACTUALLY GET.
DWolfe Says:
I hear your pain, being a college student myself. This reminds me of a poem I read somewhere else, and love. I agree with you completely. Many colleges have lost sight of what it means to truly "learn."
Terralventhe Says:
There's a reason why many of the great English writers of old never finished their official educations. They felt that there was nothing there that they could learn, and that those teaching were all full of themselves and stuck to the same drivel that many of them could easily outdo or did not agree with. For those of us who wish to dedicate our lives to the written word, especially, colleges and universities are nothing more than a lodestone around our necks, draining us of time, money, and most of all, our patience and our drive. Since I began trudging down the educational path, I have found myself writing less and less, to the point where I hardly write a creative word of prose at all anymore. The reason for this is that all of my energy is spent appeasing teachers, tutors, instructors, professors and whatever other lofty titles that they give themselves. And this appeasement, most ironically of all, is towards a series of courses that I not only have no interest in, but have no bearing on what I wish to dedicate myself to as a career.
I do not need to know how to perfectly write a 6000 word essay on a topic of someone else's choice, or know the entire phonetic and grammatical history of the English language - let alone most of the other drivel that they force my already flawed memory to absorb - to be a successful writer. This especially applies when I show my English literature professor poetry that I wrote five to six years ago, and I am complimented on not only how talented I am at writing poetry, but also that I had apparently been using a number of rules and methods which I did not even know of at the time of writing it all, but instead used because they sounded right to me.
I am stuck here, in an apartment, on the other side of the country, feeling depressed and alone, all because I am being expected to live up to someone else's expectations and achieve some lofty goal which will earn me a useless piece of parchment that says 'Bachelor's Degree of the Arts' which, inevitably, will not have any effect on my ability to be recognized as a writer, short of the insane notion that whoever is deciding what books get published does not even bother reading my work, but looks at my educational resumé and makes the decision based on that. And if that is the standard to which artists are chosen, not by their merit, but by a simple five word title on a piece of paper, then I simply shake my head at the state of affairs that we are in today.
Vidda Says:
Uh... I don't get it. Nobody is forcing anything upon you. You choose to go to college and you're free to decide to stand by anything they teach you. If they don't teach you what you want to learn then you can just read books. D:
Hey, a poem that’s lucid, understandable, and conveys a very important message! I never took the time out to read the other stuff that you posted, but I’ll go and take a look.
To address the message . . . I agree. It’s a real bitch that we have to go to university in order to get a good job. It’s a bloody waste of time and money. Nobody cares if you read Kant while you were in university. It doesn’t matter, like you say, if you can write a twelve page research paper. What employers care about is whether you can work or not.
Sadly, the only criteria employers use is the amount of education that you’ve attained.
I’d like to add my two cents to this discussion. I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who is in his last year at high school, and I have read an extensive amount of information on this topic. If there is anything to the majority of majors, it’s that they are useless. The only degrees that teach you something of value are Math, Engineering, Computer Science, Some of the Sciences (e.g. Chemistry, Physics, Geology, etc), and Economics. Most of the other degrees offered are worthless.
And of those degrees that are useful, you have to pursue graduate school if you want to do research. A real annoyance is the fact is that you have to have do a lot of postdoc work in order to be employed in, say, a biotech company. By the time you get there, you will be passé, and you’ll never be the sharp researcher that you were when you were 25. In fact, I commonly hear the saying that you might as well be dead after your 25, if you are a physicist.
I intend to pursue a technical degree that is useful. But I feel deterred by the fact that it will take forever before I can become a researcher. As of now, I am still deciding what career path I will chose, but it certainly wont be one in the arts or humanities, or anything that DOESN’T require math.
They say that a man wrapped up in himself is a very small package, but when an educational system does it what you get is a gigantic bureaucracy with professors who only have jobs because students are expected to take their classes, not because their work contributes anything useful to society.
When I learnt of this fact, it was then I reassessed my position on academia. I was sorting through the courses/majors booklet that my brother got from the university that he is attending. We laughed our asses off when we saw the kind of majors/first year courses that they offer.
I recall my brother saying that “he lost what little respect that he had for academia,†and that “they are useless parasites that should be shut down and converted into investment banks or cheap housing.†I’m not as cynical as him, but he does raise a valid point. Why is it that these institutions even exist when 95% of it is garbage?
But it isn’t completely like this. My father works in the mining industry and he learnt his geology from his colleagues. He only has grade 5, but he only dropped out because of the war that was going on. Since he has connections in the mining industry, it wouldn’t be too difficult for me to get my foot in the door without a university degree.
If your parents have connections, you can use those rather than going to university. This isn’t the case for every industry, however.
And we have to keep in mind that the majority of the stuff they teach in university can be learnt on your own. So going to university alone for the sake of learning isn’t a smart idea.
Where does this leave us? Right were you describe that every high school student is in a pinch if they want to have a good job or attain success. We need to change this, and nothing is going to happen if we sit around doing nothing about it. I don’t know what causes paradigm shifts, but I think it has something to do with changing someone’s opinion on a particular topic.