“20% of America’s millionaires never set foot in college and 21 of the 222 Americans listed as billionaires in 2003 never got their college diplomas.” Jack Canfield
There’s a renewed focus on improving the quality of our education system. I believe it oughta be one of our nation’s most important focuses. I also believe, however, that it’s crucial we each change the way we think about education. I believe we’ve entered an era of personal development where success will become increasingly contingent on our ability to self-educate, where adapting to accelerating change will demand continuous learning.
Changing our approach to education requires questioning the current approach. On that note, here’s some excerpts from a thought-provoking article by teacher and author Camille Paglia.
Vanishing of jobs will plague the rest of this decade and more…College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class…
Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense…
Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted…
Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children…
The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness…