Mind's Eye Re: Education as we have it is no longer a solution

We scientists were encouraged to go to the film club rigs. Our 20
hours of labs and 12 of lectures was supplemented by liberal studies
on Wednesday afternoons - when I played sport. Discovering most of my
team-mates only did 6 hours of class contact in drama and sociology
and still watched Coronation Street and Dr Kildare I doubted I was
missing much! Doing science is generally an inoculation against GOP
and the Tories - so I guess it is more enlightening than the so-called
humanities. Only 6% of US scientists are registered Republicans.
Personally I have to go back to 1922 to find a politician I would vote
for (E D Morel or H N Brailsford - see
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL14053527M/The_war_of_steel_and_gold).
I wonder what links not being able to do science and right-wing voting
- especially as right and left are now as differentiated as types of
fruit cake?
Packard and Illich made the point in the 1960s Andrew. Real education
might teach us why democratic foreign policy is important. We got
Shakespeare and other chronic royalist fictions instead.

On 21 Dec, 16:34, andrew vecsey <andrewvec...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just an excerpt on education in my "simplification of everything" series of
> videos.
>
> "Indoctrination centers called schools were organized. Starting at an early
> age with kindergartens, children were removed from the tutelage and
> sanctity of families and from the exploitation of factories. They were
> cultivated under a program of brainwashing called education where they were
> programmed and trained to be obedient and skilled adult workers."
>
> See YouTube video "2b Brainwashing and Education"  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2hiemdvRgg
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thursday, December 20, 2012 2:35:58 AM UTC+1, archytas wrote:
>
> >http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-19/sorry-poor-kids-road-rags-ri...
>
> > One of the higher education colleges I taught at (now a university) is
> > making lots of staff redundant - it can't attract enough students who
> > will put themselves in £50k debt to get one of the certificates I used
> > to 'sign'.  The article above at Zerohedge (via Reuters) explains what
> > has been going on.  This is largely why I quit full time lecturing ten
> > years ago.  My old college is now bidding to teach 14 - 19 year olds
> > in technical subjects demanded by employers, no doubt seeing kids of
> > this age as a captive market.  Stuff about skills in employer demand
> > has usually been guff over the last 40 years.
>
> > I see education as an aim in itself and want everyone to have access
> > to university.  My ideal is a long way from the scandal of what has
> > happened - something that involves the ludicrous claim that the ratio
> > of graduate to other jobs can be 50:50 given the encouragement of a
> > 50% participation rate at 18.  Universities have long been lying about
> > the jobs their graduates actually end up in.  Stuff like 'The Wire' is
> > nearer the truth on education in general than the plethora of league
> > tables and statistics bandied about.
>
> > It seems strange we can no longer recommend education as a 'good' -
> > but I'm sure we have to come round to this.  In many aspects it's now
> > a business as out of control as financial services, selling
> > equivalents of ppi, swaps and the lie of reward without effort.  If I
> > had kids of college age now I'd work to send them to a top university
> > (less than 10% of those in the UK), probably abroad to learn another
> > language and culture, for them to graduate without debt - but if they
> > weren't smart enough I'd get them out of school at 16 and into
> > apprenticeships or the armed services.
>
> > The madness of this is clear in the promise you can get financial
> > advantage for life by getting the same qualification as half of the
> > rest of the population.  The actual academic costs of teaching/library
> > provision outside science are about £3K not 27K and teaching content
> > is really only part-time, not full-time.  Our universities, except a
> > few, are not centres of excellence, but clapped-out factories that
> > should be closing against on-line competition.  There is an
> > alternative.

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