There is more to having an education than earning a higher salary. An educated population is more resilient and more flexible. Want to solve the worlds problems, the big ones like extreemism or climate change? Start will a better-educated population.
There is certainly an economic utility to a more educated populous, but should that cost 30k+ in debt? If the ROI isn't there and the purpose is a general one for the economic benefit of the nation, shouldn't the taxpayer bear the cost of that?
This is actually the case where I live (the Netherlands). It has pros and cons of course, balancing of which has over time put some restrictions on the usage of the system (both subsidized college fees and separate study funding).
I’ve heard this before, but would like evidence.
While I agree that education helps for I don’t want to live in a simple hunter gatherer society, does having everyone trained in worthless degrees like a feminist perspective on underwater basket weaving really make for a more robust and flexible society? One thing I saw during the pandemic was appeals to authority. Seems like as we get more and more degrees, we box out what people are allowed to say because it’s in the wrong thing. This doesn’t seem more flexible.
Most degrees do not create an educated person. An educated person needs a grounding in science, history, philosophy, literature, and - especially in our new age of disinformation - critical thinking and psychology.
I studied one of the hard sciences, and while educated in this field, I was sorely lacking in many areas. Even with my training around scientific thinking, I was unable to clearly see the biases that were injurious to my clarity of thought.
Look at universities and you see students with unhinged political beliefs, based on wild emotion tethered to neither evidence nor reason. These are not educated people, and it almost seems like some of them may have been wiser had they not pursued higher education at all. Regarding climate change, most university graduates are frustratingly ignorant and unwilling to think clearly about the solutions.
It is imperative that schools teach critical thinking and provide a desperately needed grounding in various subjects, rather than pursuing the sole purpose of ensuring their students tick the correct boxes to pass their exams. If this system were present, few would benefit from university and the profit-seeking motives of these institutions could be brought back in hand.
(disclaimer: haven't been in university for almost a decade now so I don't know whats happening on campus right now)
>Look at universities and you see students with unhinged political beliefs, based on wild emotion tethered to neither evidence nor reason.
Examples of which are? Genuinely curious and don't inherently disagree, but what are they and why are the unhinged?
>It is imperative that schools teach critical thinking and provide a desperately needed grounding in various subjects,
agreed, I think we have to remember that the education establishment is really just composed by people, so you have to be specific by what you mean by "grounding", if it means "they believe what I believe because I'm right and everyone else is uneducated" that doesn't sound like grounding, grounding is introducing ideas and allowing them to go into whichever direction that leads to, it's not called "guiding" it's called "grounding"
EDIT: quick thought, If by "grounding" you mean "normalization" in the statistical sense around a core set of beliefs, I would argue that's missing the point of education, educated people buy into beliefs from first principles, people shouldn't be buying beliefs through education
One example is people supporting terrorism; it shocks me that some people who claim to be feminists can support such an unthinkingly misogynistic group as Hamas. Of course, some genuinely care about the Palestinian people and don't approve of Hamas, but a shocking number seem to have not considered the issue at all. I want to be clear that Israel has problems and I'm not saying that they are perfect; it is a very complex issue but many are unable to see it with nuance. The group "Queers for Palestine" is farcical in its support of a state which would eradicate it without a thought.
Another is the unquestioning faith in trans ideology, which has been laid bare in the recent Cass review in the UK. Again, few are able to see the nuance that gender transition is absolutely helpful to a small number of people, but that the treatment has been unethical in some (not all) cases. I support trans people in general, and definitely want them to be treated with respect, but that doesn't mean that every autistic child who believes they are trans should go through irreversible treatments. Nicola Sturgeon (former first minister of Scotland, and a university graduate) fell from political grace after taking the stance that a male rapist should be allowed to be sent to a women-only prison, which she didn't even realise would be unpopular.
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By "grounding" I mean that people should have an understanding of what has been discovered and postulated before them, so that they can form ideas of their own. If everyone starts from square one, they have to discover so much for themselves that they will rarely make any significant progress. Indoctrination is not the goal, and learning about the important thinkers of the past may lead to seeing the flaws in their thinking and developing improved ideas.
I could never reach the brilliance of Rousseau or Newton if I started from the point at which they did, but by building off their work, I can be much closer (though still very far away). We stand on the shoulders of giants.
>Of course, some genuinely care about the Palestinian people and don't approve of Hamas, but a shocking number seem to have not considered the issue at all. I want to be clear that Israel has problems and I'm not saying that they are perfect; it is a very complex issue but many are unable to see it with nuance.
Since I kind of knew we would be circling this I'll try and tread carefully, I agree nuance is important.
Let's look at this from an abstract, if "queers for palestine" is farcical it's worth asking, how has it come into being, there had to be something that engendered it (sorry couldn't resist), that the group even exists should immediately flag a question of "why" and if they are upset about something, what is that, and how did they arrive at that conclusion, I'd argue that there's just as much nuance in that that you might be overlooking. Clearly something has gone south for someone if a group on a different continent is agitating for them
