Going to quote it whole

Because cutting it into bits and pieces would not do it justice, and I want this posted around the world.

Now I know that going back to what education once was and its purpose are over. Further, there have always been more ways to learn a trade than to get an education. That’s a feature, not a bug. Learning a trade was once the near-exclusive bastion of apprenticeships and there’s something to be said for that method.

As Aesop said, the problem with learning a trade at a university is that you learn it wrong, although it does provide grounding in the concepts. I know that is true for folks who come out with Theatre/Film degrees, at the (typical) ripe old age of 24--when it is TOO late to begin pursuing an acting career (unless you’re a character actor). Unless the goal is to teach acting, a degree in it is useless from a professional-actor standpoint.

But that isn’t why parents send their little darlings off to get a degree in Theatre/Film. They do it so their starry-eyed kids will have a “fall back” when the reality of their hopes and chances are dashed, and they get serious about life and making a living. So we have parents who are all too anxious for their children’s hopes and dreams to be destroyed, crushed by the realities of life, for the “better” purpose of making a living.

As I said, the purpose of that type of degree is totally useless in the sphere of working in the field (although the old boy/girl network it provides has been useful to many).

What is astonishing, however, is the complete disconnect on what has been happening in the world and the *gasp* coincidence of destroying education, its purpose, and what it once meant.

We have folks with parchment on their walls running industry, with the morals of sharks. They have come out of the degree mills with the ability to make money--lots of it, and they see that as the goal and purpose in life.

It wasn’t THAT long ago that the perspective was entirely different. Making a living, even a good one, was seen as a means, but not the end. The goal of making a good living was to enable one to afford a life of quiet contemplation, of travel, and of the finer things that the education gave the student the taste for. Now the acquisition of possessions, however tawdry and banal, is seen as the goal.

The acquisition of wealth, for the sake of being wealthy, is now the exclusive pursuit of far too many.

It is no surprise at all that we have disasters like Enron and WorldCom. They were run by men with degrees, and technical competencies in their respective fields, but no education whatsoever. It is no surprise that the pickings for elected representatives is tiny, as if non-existent.

If they had ANY education they would not have been the scoundrels and cads they show themselves to be.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (to name just two) were educated men… probably a handful of the last of them America produced. It isn’t an accident that they devoted a great portion of their life to public service. That’s what educated men do.

Business once cared about an education degree because it provided some degree of certainty that the person you were dealing with had their priorities in proper order. They could be counted on to do the right thing, to be men of honesty and integrity, with morals to avoid all temptations. The great burden of their education made it near-impossible for them to do otherwise. The great big baton of Western Civilization had been passed to them, and dropping all that man had learned and become was just too magnificent to allow it to be casually set aside when there were financial benefits or carnal pleasures to be had.

Education is not education when it provides anything with which to make a living, or anything we might think of today as “useful.” It concerns itself entirely with how you make your life, not your living. An educated man can learn any trade, but a tradesman can do only what he has been trained to do. The minute it becomes something to do, instead of something that is, it is no longer education.

We have this perception that honesty, integrity, and character are things that are endowed in men like legs and arms. And they are not. Civilizing people was the goal of education--exclusively. That small segment of the population, no more than 1% to 5% who were educated, went out into the world with these high ideals and kept them alive.

Now we have Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and an assortment of bad boys. Wealth itself is lauded as a demonstrative of something important. “Pioneers of Industry” are even lauded, and not recognized for the pirates they’ve become.

There are a few institutions that remain committed to education, but they suffer from the pressures of parents and industry to provide skill-training. Their programs have been altered to such an extent that they might as well throw in the towel completely.

Nock was once asked to become the chair of philosophy at a prestigious university. He’d written extensively on the subject, lamenting the loss of education throughout the world (and that was in the 1920s). He politely declined the offer, saying he’d be a useless bungler. He said that all that he would know how to do would be to take his students on their first day of class to the school library, and with great fanfare open the doors and point to the books, “there” and leave them to it.

We’re going to have to figure out how to do it differently. There are a few parents who get this and understand it, but they do it without fanfare or notice… and then there are folks like Mark (who started this thread), wanting to pursue knowledge for the sake of bettering himself, and by extension, the world around him.

We could achieve it in a myriad of ways--through the formation of Socratic Societies (there are quite a number out there, if folks look). The salon tradition is sickly, but not dead.

I doubt, however, that we’ll achieve any measure of success. We’ve gone too far down the road of believing that “all men are created equal” speaks to quality of character, rather than equality in the law, and anything that smacks of elitism is immediately shot down as bad.

All we have left are the books… and if we can keep them from the fires or banned lists, they might continue to serve their purpose… for the few who seek them out and can understand them.

Education in and of itself doesn't mean a damn thing, especially with schools and universities today. Without a foundation to build on, all an education gets you is an over-educated simpleton who can't be trusted to do much of anything. I've seen way too many people who have an education, but don't know the first thing to do with it. They have the know-how, but not the know-why.

Think I'm kidding? Look at all the Democrat American Communist Party politicians, advocating for policies which have been tried and failed. The people who vote the politicians in have degrees, don't they? How can they then advocate for a system of government which has been shown to fail in every country it's been tried?

They have an education, but that just doesn't mean what it used to.