# Careers:  Education is Continuous Learning

Source: https://geoffblades.com/careers-education-is-continuous-learning/
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2019-10-11
Author: Geoff

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> “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](http://chronicle.com/article/Revalorizing-the-Trades/124130/) 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…
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> 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…
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> 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…
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> 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…
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> The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness…