True story: Thirty-something odd years ago I was asked as an undergraduate to meet with the Board of Trustees at a prestigious research university, the name of which rhymes with Wans Blopkins. I had no idea why I was sitting at a ginormous conference table with the people who controlled the largest non-governmental employer in the state of Maryland.
Turns out that the very old, very rich, white dudes wanted to inquire about the state of ethics on the undergraduate campus and for some odd reason I was chosen.
At that time, I had already developed a near autistic capability for speaking my mind without any consideration for the consequences, so I responded with “What ethics?”
What I had seen from other undergrad was a dog-eat-dog environment that was built around shifting the Bell Curve in order to leverage their own relative performance for advantage in med school applications. People would steal textbooks from high performers, outright cheat, and otherwise seek to game the system. For non-personal ethics, the biomedical engineering department had dedicated classes, but as we all know and have seen recently, the purpose of bioethics is to find novel ways to justify moral atrocities. These were no different.
There were more examples, but the Board seemed uninterested and moved on. I suppose they felt that they needed to go through the motions for some unstated purpose.
I mention this because as the years have passed, the situation has certainly not improved and it is now reflected in society-altering events and policies. The premier medical school in the country did not even attempt to develop therapeutics for COVID. It actively promotes gender transitioning for minors. The school of public health has been behind some of the most oppressive social policies of the past two decades. Everything is about feathering ones own nest at the expense of the taxpayer, consequences be damned.
Brilliance... I for one welcome the collapse of the indoctrination engine.
I can't remember where I read it (should have bookmarked it) but some major tech company was low-key not hiring graduates from Ivy league universities because the quality of the education was too low. Instead of a Stanford degree being a marker of exceptionalism, it's become a marker of indoctrination, incompetence and sub-par education because grades are racist and tests are from the patriarchy.
Eventually the free market will sort this out, I believe, even if it takes longer than any of us want.
Superb discussion. Totally agree with everything you said.
When I applied for medical school, I interviewed with some PhD head of curriculum design/fuzzy job description type at the school I ultimately attended. She asked routine questions, one of which was what did I think were the traits that made a good doctor. Most of my response was the usual stuff - compassion, dedication, intelligence, a desire to help others, self-discipline. Then I said that a doctor should also be a creative person, an original thinker, in order to solve difficult problems in clinical scenarios and in research, sometimes one needs to think outside the box. She did not like this response. She looked perplexed, literally laughed in my face, nervous laughter, like this was the craziest thing she had ever heard. She said “ I’m not sure that’s really useful.” She didn’t elaborate. I was somewhat taken aback, but smiled and looked pretty. In looking back over my education and long career, I realize that was always the message from the institutions I attended. Stay in your lane. Don’t be too creative. Don’t be too smart either, you’ll make us look bad. Excel, but excel on our terms. That’s the norm in the university. The fact is that the academics are generally a petty group and will smash you if they feel threatened. They like titles and other trivial perquisites and having young people around to lord it over. There are of course wonderful exceptions to this, but by and large the academic orthodoxy is just that. Creativity, inventiveness, and curiosity are often suppressed in favor of political correctness and career oriented institutional asskissing. It’s a good thing when
the academy is scrutinized. COVID revealed a lot of incompetence, dishonesty, and cruelty within the ranks of the professoriat and administrations of universities. Time for a change.
we’ve reached the end of university and school as we know it, I work in Ed tech and things are going to change a lot quicker than people realize
we already have personalized learning software that adapts to each students ability level. Advances in AI are only going to improve programs customIzed to students and that’s why we need to make sure AI is NOT REGULATED
If it’s regulated, limits will be placed in what it can spit out, you can already see this a bit with ChatGPT. Whoever makes the regulations will censor AI for their benefit.
However, if it’s uncensored, students can have unfettered access to information.
I’m not saying school will go away, we all know the importance of socialization for children, but college just might.
Universities got absurdly greedy jacking up prices and it’s going to be tough to send a kid to college for $50k a year to get indoctrinated when tools such as AI will be able to teach many things (specially social sciences)
This isn’t to start there won’t be a place for college, there will. But it’s going to be a lot different than the one we know today.
As a society, I think we should push for
1. Unregulated AI
2. Dropping the idea that you need a bachelors degree to start working. You don’t.
3. Encouragement for alternative pathways past high school graduation
I love everything about this post. I am an unschooler. My kid was unschooled. I work in Academia but never attended college. I see what is happening and truth lives in egm’s words. Define “educated.” Can you? Learning happens everywhere all the time. You can’t box it up and slap a diploma on it.
I’m increasingly convinced it all comes down to fiat money. If you aren’t connected and, to some extent, corruptible, it is extremely difficult to get rich these days. I realized I was going to have to choose between a life of integrity or a sinecure. It wasn’t really a choice because I’m not a good candidate for the latter, but watching my household real wages *lose* every year against monetary inflation, while insane energy policies drive the cost of living to stratospheric heights, is depressing and distressing.
I can understand the temptation to grab what you can and bar the gates. When the money is corrupt, corruption is what will make money, and corruption starts within.
This reminds me somewhat of the movie Finding Bobby Fischer, where the highly ranked chess master instructor gets so incensed because the kid keeps playing chess in the park with the hustlers. "Gutter chess", not our sort, young man. But the kid picks up techniques and risk taking strategies that prove invaluable in competition and ultimately wins out.
great essay. I see the same trend in “broadcast media”, local news, mainstream media, etc. where the good people get sick of the BS and leave for adjacent fields or small business. unfortunately, the Fed govt. stands ready to prop up all failed businesses as long as they continue to serve the Fed govt. so i don’t think they go away quickly, unfortunately, but hopefully become quickly irrelevant.
I homeschooled my three who are now young adults. I myself went to an arrogant university and didn’t want that or public school indoctrination for mine. They are grads of or currently attending Liberty University. LU is being flooded with refugees from the woke colleges who want to learn practical, marketable skills. My oldest graduated with a degree in graphic design and my middle kid is thriving in computer science.
My dad was a Marine Corps sergeant, God rest his soul. He told me that if you gave him a child before the age of five, that he would teach that child things that you would never break him of. Daycare has raised several generations of Americans. When my dad was a child daycare was considered a communist plot. It is a communist plot, but few realize it. The majority of the population has acquiesced the rearing of their children to the State in exchange for convenience and money, and then wonder why their children are foaming-at-the-mouth commies.
The elites/credentialed class went SO overboard they eviscerated any and all trust in every utterance they make.
How can anyone with an IQ above 80 (and probably well below) not be filled with a deep and abiding cynicism for ALL the (former) institutions of power in our society?
They behaved like lying whores (redundant?) these last three plus years. It’s been disillusioning--but truth is not necessarily supposed to comfort.
College is where we learn how to walk talk and think like the Elite. We learn that work is for the proletariat- Not for us.
Learning a skill is simply a way to express that we are of a lower caste. Who cares that it makes us happier? Who wants contentment and fulfilment when we can join the Elite? Seriously! Don't be fooled by this "reputation" business!
I went to three semesters of college trying to figure what I wanted to be. I left when I realized that what I wanted to be was uneducated. They all sounded like bull shitters to me. I don’t like bull shit so becoming a bull shitter was not an option. Eventually I became a firefighter, after 13 years of trying a lot of other hard jobs. It’s been a good life, I’m well paid and I have savings, investments and a looming retirement in 5 months. Unfortunately, being a firefighter has been co-opted by educators, experts who seem to think that redefining smoke as “particles and products of combustion” somehow makes putting a fire out to be some sort of educated magic. It ain’t. Put the wet stuff on the red stuff.
Firefighters now have continuing education requirements, as much as 54 hours a year where I am. That does not include EMS continuing Ed, which is another 40 hours for basic EMTs and 80 per anum for EMT paramedics. Add in heavy rescue or EOD (bomb) technician and it keeps growing. I won’t miss it.
The reputation economy is not new, in the days of old, everyone either owned a small business (or farm) or you worked for someone who did. And those businesses only survived if they developed a good reputation. I welcome the return to reputation value!
True story: Thirty-something odd years ago I was asked as an undergraduate to meet with the Board of Trustees at a prestigious research university, the name of which rhymes with Wans Blopkins. I had no idea why I was sitting at a ginormous conference table with the people who controlled the largest non-governmental employer in the state of Maryland.
Turns out that the very old, very rich, white dudes wanted to inquire about the state of ethics on the undergraduate campus and for some odd reason I was chosen.
At that time, I had already developed a near autistic capability for speaking my mind without any consideration for the consequences, so I responded with “What ethics?”
What I had seen from other undergrad was a dog-eat-dog environment that was built around shifting the Bell Curve in order to leverage their own relative performance for advantage in med school applications. People would steal textbooks from high performers, outright cheat, and otherwise seek to game the system. For non-personal ethics, the biomedical engineering department had dedicated classes, but as we all know and have seen recently, the purpose of bioethics is to find novel ways to justify moral atrocities. These were no different.
There were more examples, but the Board seemed uninterested and moved on. I suppose they felt that they needed to go through the motions for some unstated purpose.
I mention this because as the years have passed, the situation has certainly not improved and it is now reflected in society-altering events and policies. The premier medical school in the country did not even attempt to develop therapeutics for COVID. It actively promotes gender transitioning for minors. The school of public health has been behind some of the most oppressive social policies of the past two decades. Everything is about feathering ones own nest at the expense of the taxpayer, consequences be damned.
Brilliance... I for one welcome the collapse of the indoctrination engine.
I can't remember where I read it (should have bookmarked it) but some major tech company was low-key not hiring graduates from Ivy league universities because the quality of the education was too low. Instead of a Stanford degree being a marker of exceptionalism, it's become a marker of indoctrination, incompetence and sub-par education because grades are racist and tests are from the patriarchy.
Eventually the free market will sort this out, I believe, even if it takes longer than any of us want.
Superb discussion. Totally agree with everything you said.
When I applied for medical school, I interviewed with some PhD head of curriculum design/fuzzy job description type at the school I ultimately attended. She asked routine questions, one of which was what did I think were the traits that made a good doctor. Most of my response was the usual stuff - compassion, dedication, intelligence, a desire to help others, self-discipline. Then I said that a doctor should also be a creative person, an original thinker, in order to solve difficult problems in clinical scenarios and in research, sometimes one needs to think outside the box. She did not like this response. She looked perplexed, literally laughed in my face, nervous laughter, like this was the craziest thing she had ever heard. She said “ I’m not sure that’s really useful.” She didn’t elaborate. I was somewhat taken aback, but smiled and looked pretty. In looking back over my education and long career, I realize that was always the message from the institutions I attended. Stay in your lane. Don’t be too creative. Don’t be too smart either, you’ll make us look bad. Excel, but excel on our terms. That’s the norm in the university. The fact is that the academics are generally a petty group and will smash you if they feel threatened. They like titles and other trivial perquisites and having young people around to lord it over. There are of course wonderful exceptions to this, but by and large the academic orthodoxy is just that. Creativity, inventiveness, and curiosity are often suppressed in favor of political correctness and career oriented institutional asskissing. It’s a good thing when
the academy is scrutinized. COVID revealed a lot of incompetence, dishonesty, and cruelty within the ranks of the professoriat and administrations of universities. Time for a change.
we’ve reached the end of university and school as we know it, I work in Ed tech and things are going to change a lot quicker than people realize
we already have personalized learning software that adapts to each students ability level. Advances in AI are only going to improve programs customIzed to students and that’s why we need to make sure AI is NOT REGULATED
If it’s regulated, limits will be placed in what it can spit out, you can already see this a bit with ChatGPT. Whoever makes the regulations will censor AI for their benefit.
However, if it’s uncensored, students can have unfettered access to information.
I’m not saying school will go away, we all know the importance of socialization for children, but college just might.
Universities got absurdly greedy jacking up prices and it’s going to be tough to send a kid to college for $50k a year to get indoctrinated when tools such as AI will be able to teach many things (specially social sciences)
This isn’t to start there won’t be a place for college, there will. But it’s going to be a lot different than the one we know today.
As a society, I think we should push for
1. Unregulated AI
2. Dropping the idea that you need a bachelors degree to start working. You don’t.
3. Encouragement for alternative pathways past high school graduation
What do you guys think?
I love everything about this post. I am an unschooler. My kid was unschooled. I work in Academia but never attended college. I see what is happening and truth lives in egm’s words. Define “educated.” Can you? Learning happens everywhere all the time. You can’t box it up and slap a diploma on it.
I’m increasingly convinced it all comes down to fiat money. If you aren’t connected and, to some extent, corruptible, it is extremely difficult to get rich these days. I realized I was going to have to choose between a life of integrity or a sinecure. It wasn’t really a choice because I’m not a good candidate for the latter, but watching my household real wages *lose* every year against monetary inflation, while insane energy policies drive the cost of living to stratospheric heights, is depressing and distressing.
I can understand the temptation to grab what you can and bar the gates. When the money is corrupt, corruption is what will make money, and corruption starts within.
"Dr Peter Hotez. Will you please report to the Dean's office. Dr Peter Hotez, please report to the Dean's office."
This reminds me somewhat of the movie Finding Bobby Fischer, where the highly ranked chess master instructor gets so incensed because the kid keeps playing chess in the park with the hustlers. "Gutter chess", not our sort, young man. But the kid picks up techniques and risk taking strategies that prove invaluable in competition and ultimately wins out.
great essay. I see the same trend in “broadcast media”, local news, mainstream media, etc. where the good people get sick of the BS and leave for adjacent fields or small business. unfortunately, the Fed govt. stands ready to prop up all failed businesses as long as they continue to serve the Fed govt. so i don’t think they go away quickly, unfortunately, but hopefully become quickly irrelevant.
I homeschooled my three who are now young adults. I myself went to an arrogant university and didn’t want that or public school indoctrination for mine. They are grads of or currently attending Liberty University. LU is being flooded with refugees from the woke colleges who want to learn practical, marketable skills. My oldest graduated with a degree in graphic design and my middle kid is thriving in computer science.
I sure hope you're right, gato. It feels like we have been running circles around the "experts" for years but also just running in circles for years.
The end of the age of idiots can't come fast enough.
The root goes deeper.
My dad was a Marine Corps sergeant, God rest his soul. He told me that if you gave him a child before the age of five, that he would teach that child things that you would never break him of. Daycare has raised several generations of Americans. When my dad was a child daycare was considered a communist plot. It is a communist plot, but few realize it. The majority of the population has acquiesced the rearing of their children to the State in exchange for convenience and money, and then wonder why their children are foaming-at-the-mouth commies.
Another silver lining to COVID hysteria?
The elites/credentialed class went SO overboard they eviscerated any and all trust in every utterance they make.
How can anyone with an IQ above 80 (and probably well below) not be filled with a deep and abiding cynicism for ALL the (former) institutions of power in our society?
They behaved like lying whores (redundant?) these last three plus years. It’s been disillusioning--but truth is not necessarily supposed to comfort.
College is where we learn how to walk talk and think like the Elite. We learn that work is for the proletariat- Not for us.
Learning a skill is simply a way to express that we are of a lower caste. Who cares that it makes us happier? Who wants contentment and fulfilment when we can join the Elite? Seriously! Don't be fooled by this "reputation" business!
There, I've said my piece. The rest is up to you.
Universities:
Overrated, overpriced, underwhelming.
Go STEM.
I went to three semesters of college trying to figure what I wanted to be. I left when I realized that what I wanted to be was uneducated. They all sounded like bull shitters to me. I don’t like bull shit so becoming a bull shitter was not an option. Eventually I became a firefighter, after 13 years of trying a lot of other hard jobs. It’s been a good life, I’m well paid and I have savings, investments and a looming retirement in 5 months. Unfortunately, being a firefighter has been co-opted by educators, experts who seem to think that redefining smoke as “particles and products of combustion” somehow makes putting a fire out to be some sort of educated magic. It ain’t. Put the wet stuff on the red stuff.
Firefighters now have continuing education requirements, as much as 54 hours a year where I am. That does not include EMS continuing Ed, which is another 40 hours for basic EMTs and 80 per anum for EMT paramedics. Add in heavy rescue or EOD (bomb) technician and it keeps growing. I won’t miss it.
The reputation economy is not new, in the days of old, everyone either owned a small business (or farm) or you worked for someone who did. And those businesses only survived if they developed a good reputation. I welcome the return to reputation value!