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degringolade
I sorta walked away from science in 2008. I guess that I didn't so much walk away as moved to the edges and disengaged from the belief systems that the upper crust worships.
I am stilll stuck here on the fringes of the scientific/industrial world. Trying to figure out how to stay somewhat comfortable out of the blast radius and the falling rubble as this way of thinking an the people who run it self-destruct. I cant really save them. They are too far gone. The "good" and "smart" people have walled off the system so that it serves them quite well. Their move into the comfortable 20% and their efforts and serial apprenticeships at what is laughingly called "higher" education has equipped them well for the act of sneering condescension that they display on the majority. Fools all, uneducated fools at that. They can't accept our judgement of what is right and wrong and how what we, the educated elite< have defined as good and right.
The trouble is that anyone, educated or not, who is willing to put some thought into this little conundrum realizes that such a thing can't possibly be stable.
The educated elite came up with the idea that education itself is a panacea. We will just give everyone a college degree and a white collar job and they will come around. This one was the funny one. It put the educated elites in the "educational" system in charge, and, being elite, they started arranging things so that they got paid better and made the possession of a highly specific piece of paper quite specific and quite expensive and thusly put up barriers to the jobs. This was done from simple self-interest. They knew that they were creating competition for the few high-paying sinecures that were actually available. They probably even understood that there wouldn't be a sufficient amount of the high quality jobs that people were going to school to get when they went about educating people. But they needed to have sufficient market share to support their rapidly inflating salaries. So the little idea that there would be a overeducated and underemployed non-elite in their future didn't bother them at all.
All kinds of things have happened since this idea came about. The school systems defunded anything that didn't buy into the model of a college education for all. Somehow the idea of working for a living became anathema and the working class became the 47% or the deplorables (depending on Party and gender affiliation) and the elite began to think of themselves as an elite.
I think that the simple discussion of the complete failure of the American educational system and it's absolute subservience to the elite-liberal worldview is the fons et origo of the problems we are facing is the step that needs to be taken before any serious reform can be implemented.
And devil take the hindmost.
ivory towers are no longer fashionable
Date: 2020-08-02 04:52 pm (UTC)30 years ago I lived in a tiny apartment complex in Tucson, mostly inhabited by ABD linguists from the UofA. They were just beginning to realize that 20 years' schooling would shortly be dumping them into an overpopulated pool. My friend Pat said she would be the one asking, "Would you like a sentence with those fries?"
Re: ivory towers are no longer fashionable
Date: 2020-08-02 06:24 pm (UTC)But the elite, in the simple act of thinking of themselves as elite, have canted the system so that equality cannot, will not, and should not occur. To the elite, inequality isn't a bug, it is a feature. The "good people" will be taking their just desserts )thank you very much) and those who can't keep up will serve them fries.
But while you and I seem to have made a concrete choice to settle, the young ones who have been bilked for a princely sum to come to the same conclusion that we came to, aren't in the mood for putting up with the nonsense.
Revolutionary leaders are usually drawn from those educated persons who aspired to the elite and didn't quite get there.