Credentials

[degringolade]

 

Symbolism / Ferdinand Hodler/ The Woodman

Ugo hammered home a good one last night.  

Kinda like this one, there are things in it that I don’t particularly agree with, and there are omissions that I think need to be addressed, but, as he describes in the article itself, it is the discussion that makes the whole thing interesting and useful.

One of the issues that I don’t feel that were usefully addressed in the piece was the way that education has so joyously taken on the money-making role of credentialism and that by getting fat on the increase in cost that comes with insinuating themselves into every “professional” certification.

Now, It is my curmudgeonly opinion that having a certificate from an institute of higher learning stating that one has been anointed to perform a specific task is worth absolutely zero.  The days of a serious general education requirement where one is taught to think and discuss is gone.  Replacing it is a series of indoctrinations, spread out over as long a period of time as can be reasonably required (gotta keep the income stream going), that is built around the simple idea of indoctrinating students into the vagaries of methods approved of by most of the potential employers in the field.  

It seems to me that in the last fifty years, the universities have swapped out their role of training a mind to think to a role of training their mind to obey.  That training is bought and paid for by commercial interests for the benefit of profits, as they have paid for a system not to educate, but indoctrinate.

Comments

I miss George Carlin

[chefxh]

"They want obedient workers. Obedient workers who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork..."