Formal education is a soul-stealing institution that prepares you for a safe life of guaranteed drudgery. Nothing will strip you of your creativity and your sense of adventure faster than trying to get a degree.
I have nothing against education. I love education. People need education. I hate schooling. I hate the idea that's planted in our skulls that we cannot learn what we need by our own efforts, under our own motivation, and that any milestone you make is worthless unless it's related to an assignment.
I would never go to a doctor that hasn't been trained, but is the current system necessary to ensure we get well-trained doctors? Why force a prospective medical student to go through university before attending medical school when most of what they learn there won't be applied? Why issue grades when they ultimately say nothing about how capable you are at what you do?
People go to school to get some fancy letters at the end of their name. Whether or not they come out of it with an education depends on the student, but if so much is on them why do we have the school in the first place?
I will be all for schooling when the following changes are made:
1. It's dirt cheap. Something that's supposedly vital to your well-being should not cost thousands upon hundreds of thousands of dollars. I know the argument is that once you've got the degree your salary will be high enough that you can pay it off easy, but said argument doesn't reflect the reality I've seen. No, in the reality I live in Biology students have lucrative management positions at my local Wendy's. Which brings me to my second point...
2. They provide quality guidance beyond, "You need to get a degree! Any degree! YOU'RE %&$*ED WITHOUT A DEGREE!" All it does is stress the student out and distance them from what they really want to do. Furthermore, you've got a bunch of stoned slackers that go to college not because they want to improve themselves, not because they want to learn, but because they think college is nothing more than a money making scheme that'll put 'em on easy street. The problem is that that's how it's marketed, and worse it fails to live up to its promise.
3. They need to decide what college is really for. Is it vocational training? Is it to expand your mind and broaden your horizons? Because trying to do both of those things isn't working out so well. When a degree is required for pretty rudimentary jobs you've got people who are going through the system just so they can find work and extra course load is accomplishing nothing aside from eating at their time. It's bloated, inefficient, and fails to accurately account for the student's needs.
I can keep going but I'm gonna stop before I get carried away. Again, I'm all for standards, I'm all for education, but we need to question the value of the standards we have because looking at the world around me they seem pretty hollow.
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