All alike in their fuckedupedness. (Apologies to John Ringo.)
Let’s take this apart, shall we? President Obama to visit Indianapolis Friday
“What I heard earlier is that it’s just going to be in Indianapolis, then I heard it was going to be here and I thought, ‘That’s great, cool for the students and cool for the faculty and really cool for Indianapolis’,” said Ivy Tech student Jason Chapel.
Uh, yeah, right Mr. Chapel. In what way is it cool for any of you? For students and faculty, you’re going to have a major issue getting onto campus and to your classes, let alone be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the Great (in his own mind) Man. Your college is going to foot the bill for security and be lucky to get most of it back — and that all comes out of your pockets (or your parents’, if you’re jobless and aren’t getting ready to file in April like the rest of us poor dumb schmucks). And Indianapolis residents are going to be harassed and generally inconvenienced with street closures and extra security costs put on the IMPD that may or may not be paid back ever. Yeah, that’s all really cool for Indianapolis. Why couldn’t he have simply used Skype?
Students also think the idea of free tuition is cool, as a way of giving them a boost in life without the crushing debt that can come with college.
“I think that it’s so wonderful with community college and his focus is definitely on the community colleges, trying to get them to where there’s no tuition because college is so expensive now,” said student Pam Reason.
Too bad you can’t reason, Ms. Reason. Why is college so expensive? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not because the value of education has gone up. No, it’s because your college/university has more administrators than it does teaching staff. It has more expensive buildings that have to be paid for than it needs. And it has spent a gazillion dollars on a high-tech iceberg of which most students will never see more than the tip. That’s why tuition has skyrocketed since I was an undergraduate paying $50 per credit hour, only 25 years ago. It pains me to think about what my wife is paying for a graduate degree right now. (Another hint: A lot more than I paid for grad school.)
The way to make a college degree affordable is to force colleges and universities to slim down and stop the crazy spending. And for a bunch of you to go to trade school where you belong, not to college where many of you fail and drop out. Some people just aren’t cut out for college, but nobody in our educational establishment wants to admit it.
It’s expensive, but needed. Experts say more than half the jobs in Indiana will need some education beyond high school by 2018, but only 33 percent of adults in Indiana have an associate degree or higher.
Ah, and here we come to the crux of the matter. These jobs will need post-secondary education because our public schools are NOT DOING THEIR JOBS. Eighth-graders used to leave school with a better basic skill set for living than our high school seniors do today. And it wasn’t because they didn’t have all the high tech to learn and deal with that we have today; they had to pull their learnin’ out of books, the hard way, and from excellent teachers who actually taught instead of indoctrinated. These students were my parents, my grandparents, and great-grandparents. To some extent they were myself, as well — we certainly didn’t have computers or the Internet when I graduated from high school, and not to the extent that a computer was a common household item until a couple of decades after that. When I was in college in the late ’80’s, we found books in the library either by going through the card catalog or by physically walking through the stacks. We couldn’t just Google it.
My mother taught typing, for God’s sake. I just read today that Indiana schools are starting to teach keyboarding again because ISTEP is going to be given on computers this time around.
The answer is not free community college. The answer is to make our existing K-12 schools work and actually provide an education to the children who attend them, instead of the child abuse that is currently considered “teaching”.
Jerry Pournelle starts many of his View From Chaos Manor postings with this quote:
If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.
— Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983
I couldn’t say it any better.