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DSquared
aka Aristotleded24
Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 5570
Location: Winnipeg
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 Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:56 pm Post subject: A Proper University Convocation Speech |
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Bill Maher should be invited to make the speech
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This is pre-eminently the time, to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-Franklin Delano Roosevelt |
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chrisl
Member
Joined: 04 Nov 2006
Posts: 88
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swirrlygrrl
Fulltime enMasse Member
Joined: 12 Apr 2006
Posts: 321
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 11:57 am Post subject: |
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| I enjoyed that very much chrisl...apparently, I need to watch more YouTube. |
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Hephaestion
Deeply Shallow
Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 24243
Location: Where the Wild Things Are...
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 12:09 pm Post subject: |
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This reminds me of one'a my favorite cuts off the album, "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere" by Utah Phillips and Ani Difranco -- which consists of numerous spoken-word pieces by Phillips, which Difranco has later added instrumental tracks to. I have transcribed below the piece in question, which is called "Natural Resources", and it's fairly self-explanatory:
Natural Resources
by Utah Phillips
I was invited to the State Young Writers' Conference out at Cheney, which is an Eastern Washington university, and I didn't wanna embarrass my son, you know, and I was gonna behave myself because I had to live there then.
But, I got on the stage... it was an enormous auditorium. There were 2,700 young faces out there, none of them with any prospects that anybody could detect... and off to the side of the stage was this suit-'n-tie crowd, of people from the school district, and the principals. The main speaker following me was from the Chamber of Commerce. Well, something inside of me... snapped. (crowd laughs)
And I got to the microphone, and I looked out over that multitude of faces, and I said something to the effect of, "You're about to be told one more time that you're America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? (crowd whoops and laughs)
"Have you seen a strip mine, have you seen a clear-cut in the forest, have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're gonna strip mine your soul, they're gonna clear-cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, 'coz the profit system follows the path of least resistance, and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked. Hmph!" (raucous cheers and laughter from crowd)
Well, there was great gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments -- mine. I was borne to the door, screaming epithets over my shoulder, something to the effect of, "Make a break for it, kids! (Uproarious laughter from crowd) Flee to the wilderness -- the one within, if you can find it."
I wrote them a nice letter, though, as I oozed out of the state, headed for Nevada City. I sent it to their little literary magazine. I respect kids... especially little kids. Little kids are... assholes. But they're their own assholes. It's when they grow up that they become... (fade out, with sounds of crowd laughing in background)
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"The dignity of an animal is measured by his capacity to revolt in the face of oppression." -- Mikhail Bakunin |
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chrisl
Member
Joined: 04 Nov 2006
Posts: 88
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 10:46 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere" by Utah Phillips and Ani Difranco |
Thank you, something new to enjoy  |
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Tehanu
More or less, more or less
Joined: 12 Apr 2006
Posts: 17640
Location: Seceded from the Ford Nation
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| Posted: Wed Sep 23, 2009 2:49 am Post subject: |
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| Ah, Ani diFranco. I remember going to a cosy bar-type concert of hers with my newly-acquired girlfriend at the time, and us being newly acquired by each other, and young and starry-eyed, we were perhaps a little over-indulgent in the PDAs. Mind you, this was also the early 90s, so I suppose there was an activist component to it as well. Ani was quite taken by our obvious affection for each other, and commented as such. Warm fuzzies all over the place. |
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DSquared
aka Aristotleded24
Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 5570
Location: Winnipeg
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| Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2009 3:26 am Post subject: |
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Briarpatch connects dots between university enrollment, credential inflation, declining standards, entitlement, student debt, and economic insecurity:
| Quote: | he post-secondary system is bulging with both students and irresolvable contradictions. The labour market of the past is gone and in its place are huge numbers of lower-paid, temporary, part-time jobs with few benefits and no security - what is known as contingent work. At the same time as this has unfolded, young Canadians have been encouraged to believe that if they just get better educated, they’ll be okay. But at the end of the degree, many are faced with few real prospects. Some will eventually climb out of contingent work and out of debt. Some will undoubtedly get the job in their field that makes it all worthwhile. But the statistics are not promising and the costs are very high.
If the mid-level jobs aren’t there, why is post-secondary education seen as essential for Canada’s economic future? Why does everyone from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada to the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations to the Steelworkers Union call for increased funding and incentives for post-secondary education? Why is it politically savvy to increase student loans and grants, as the federal Minister of Human Resources, Diane Finley, has recently done? Apparently, we’ve all bought the story about Canada’s future as a knowledge economy.
This all suits the private sector, of course. They’ve done quite well thanks to the explosion of indebted, underemployed post-secondary graduates. In the good old days, companies would hire people out of high school (or before) and invest the time and energy to train them. The idea was that you created loyal employees who would advance gradually through the ranks as they learned more about company operations. Gradual advancement and job security were the employees’ rewards for sticking with the company, while a tailor-made fit with company operations was the company’s reward for expending the money and energy to train workers. These days, corporations want neither to offer secure employment nor take the time to train. By insisting on post-secondary qualifications for larger and larger numbers of jobs, businesses have transferred the costs of what is increasingly considered to be “basic” training to individuals and families, some of whom can ill afford to absorb them.
Rather than warehousing our youth in costly institutions, and rather than absorbing the costs of training that businesses used to pay, wouldn’t our efforts be better spent working to improve employment opportunities for all? We should be mobilizing against contingent work in all sectors by raising minimum wages and benefits and cracking down on the conversion of full-time to part-time work. We should be asking for government initiatives to bring innovative manufacturing back to our shores and supporting unionization of service work to improve working conditions. In short, we should be working toward a world where young Canadians do not have to sell their souls or drive themselves crazy for the right to work and live comfortably.
Post-secondary education won’t solve any of these problems. It undoubtedly has a place in our society and our economy, but for many, the blind pursuit of a higher education at any cost may do more harm than good. |
_________________
This is pre-eminently the time, to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-Franklin Delano Roosevelt |
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DSquared
aka Aristotleded24
Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 5570
Location: Winnipeg
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| Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 11:41 pm Post subject: |
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Is higher education worth it?
| Quote: | But in the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket. A resume without a college degree is never going to get past the computer programs that screen applications. Why? Certainly it’s not because most corporate employers possess a deep affinity for the life of the mind. In fact in his book Executive Blues G. J. Meyers warned of the “academic stench” that can sink a career: That master’s degree in English? Better not mention it.
My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one’s ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you’ll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end—whether in library carrels or office cubicles-- does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned – although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.
Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-“team-player.” You will do anything. You will grovel. |
Check out this comment on that page:
| Quote: | | I think another reason that white-collar employers might prefer college grads is that it serves as a helpful filter for professions that want to pay lip service to racial and class diversity, but don't want to actually have to follow through on that promise with any real rigor. The population of college grads remains disproportionately white, and disproportionately upper middle class (and above). Requiring a BA for an job applicant to even get through the door makes it much easier to claim that the lack of diversity in your company's managerial staff is somebody else's fault. |
_________________
This is pre-eminently the time, to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-Franklin Delano Roosevelt |
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Raos
volatilis vir
Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 5472
Location: Petropolis
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| Posted: Wed Jun 15, 2011 7:03 am Post subject: |
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In some ways I totally agree with that, but I also disagree with much of how the issue is (at least initially, as in the case of this piece where if you actually read the whole thing it thesis develops a different tone, but more frequently generally) framed.
The question of whether higher education is "worth it" always gets addressed in the same way: jobs and money. I think I may see where the problem stems from, when the only metric anybody ever thinks to use to assess the value of higher education is filthy lucre. I totally think the author gets that, ("College can be the most amazingly enlightening experience of a lifetime. I loved almost every minute of it, from St. Augustine to organic chemistry, from Chaucer to electricity and magnetism.") yet that one sentence follows 6 paragraphs of juggling the intersections of education, jobs, and money; specifically regarding how the first does and doesn't lead to the other two.
Which takes me in two different directions. One: in the case of the US, the author is spot on. | Quote: | | All right, lying is a grievous sin, as everyone outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue knows. And we wouldn’t want a lot of fake MIT engineering graduates designing our bridges. But there are ways in which the higher education industry is becoming a racket: Buy our product or be condemned to life of penury, and our product can easily cost well over $100,000. |
For-profit higher education down there has some decidedly dubious outfits, and broad swathes of it rightly deserve the title of racket. In most of those cases they're not even pretending to sell you the enlightening experience, they're outright selling you the admission ticket for your career and economic future. And I think that's where it ends up leading when you spend so much time offloading costs with accompanying rhetoric about it being a personal investment and yada and so fourth.
And two: the problem never (or rarely) seems to actually be the education. | Quote: | Can you be fired for doing a great job, year after year, and in fact [. . .]
[. . .]
But in the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket. A resume without a college degree is never going to get past the computer programs that screen [job] applications. Why? Certainly it’s not because most corporate employers possess a deep affinity for the life of the mind. In fact in his book Executive Blues G. J. Meyers warned of the “academic stench” that can sink a career: That master’s degree in English? Better not mention it.
My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one’s ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you’ll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end—whether in library carrels or office cubicles-- does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned – although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.
Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-“team-player.” You will do anything. You will grovel.
College can be the most amazingly enlightening experience of a lifetime. I loved almost every minute of it, from St. Augustine to organic chemistry, from Chaucer to electricity and magnetism. But we need a distinguished blue ribbon commission to investigate its role as a toll booth on the road to employment, and the obvious person to head up this commission is Marilee Jones. |
Seems to me that the problem is squarely in the court of business and industry, not education. You could reform the entire education system into whatever you want, but it won't change anything if the employers still treat the degrees in the same manner. The problem that needs fixing is the employment side. Don't want higher education to be just a "toll booth on the road to employment"? The people actively requiring degrees for job access are the ones causing, and consequently the ones who have the power to change, that situation The ones granting the degrees aren't really in control of that train. |
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DSquared
aka Aristotleded24
Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 5570
Location: Winnipeg
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| Posted: Wed Jun 15, 2011 7:24 am Post subject: |
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| Raos wrote: | | The question of whether higher education is "worth it" always gets addressed in the same way: jobs and money. I think I may see where the problem stems from, when the only metric anybody ever thinks to use to assess the value of higher education is filthy lucre. I totally think the author gets that, ("College can be the most amazingly enlightening experience of a lifetime. I loved almost every minute of it, from St. Augustine to organic chemistry, from Chaucer to electricity and magnetism.") yet that one sentence follows 6 paragraphs of juggling the intersections of education, jobs, and money; specifically regarding how the first does and doesn't lead to the other two. |
That's an important point, because actual education that encourages people to think differently, like history, English, or philosophy is looked down upon as if it's not "real" education or somehow "useless." I'm sure you've heard all the jokes and all the lines.
_________________
This is pre-eminently the time, to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-Franklin Delano Roosevelt |
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