Written in response to issue #78 of NETFUTURE
Once again, thank you for a great NETFUTURE! (And: "Damn. Once again he said it better.")
I saw through the fallacies of department heads who insisted I take classes on subjects I already knew so that their enrollment figures could be higher, and the expectations that for most people effective learning takes place in a lecture environment, and all of those other lies, and dropped out of college so I could further my education.
I look back at my sisters who've graduated liberal arts programs with crippling debts, exhorted at their graduation speeches to "go out and change the world" while saddled with debt which made it necessary to immediately join the wage-slave consumerism grind and after enduring four years of indoctrination into the worst aspects of that philosophy, and wonder how long we'll continue to put up with this hypocracy.
For the most part, the college system that exists today is an excuse for the failure of grade schools to teach and to instill a desire for learning, and a breakdown in the mechanisms of trust. Those who rely on degrees as confirmation of ability are assuming that the skills necessary to follow rules, sit, listen, and parrot back what they heard at test time are transferrable to real world tasks.
Perhaps they are, but I'm glad to have avoided those particular tasks so far.
Friday, October 16th, 1998 danlyke@flutterby.com