The Institute of Directors (IoD)says people are leaving university with useless degrees which could damage their job prospects not improve them.
The employers' organisation wants the government to scrap its target of getting 50% of under-30s to university by 2010.
--BBC
In the US, the expression for this sentiment
is summed up in the truism: "The world needs ditchdiggers." Bizzare. I thought this was the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth.
Also, this article is evidence countries besides the US perceive education as only a means to a job.
Ditch diggers and street sweepers
ziggy on 2002-07-22T16:40:42
One very interesting thing I noticed about Japan is that
everyone is Japanese. Sounds like a stupid oversimplification, but it actually looked rather strange to me that everyone -- from the taxi driver to the bank clerk to the guy sweeping the stairs in the subway to the convenience store clerk -- was Japanese.
In most other places I've lived/visited, there are large groups of immigrants or migrants who perform the less desirable jobs that are collectively "not us". That's probably still the case to some degree in Japan as well, but it just seemed like the country as a whole took ownership of the meanial jobs instead of shoving them off to the undesirables, migrants and immigrants.
Re:Ditch diggers and street sweepers
chaoticset on 2002-07-22T17:02:50
(Note: Forgive this question if it seems ill-informed, because I really don't have any direct experience of Japan myself. I have read a book by an American in Japan, but that's hardly direct evidence.)
Couldn't that be explained by the enormous pressure put upon the pre-career-choice Japanese person by their parents and teachers combined with the enormous social pressure not to contradict people in better status than you?
Re:Ditch diggers and street sweepers
TorgoX on 2002-07-23T19:19:38
Japan isn't exactly one big happy family. Lots of those menial jobs are, in fact, held by undesirables -- Nth-generation Koreans, burakumin, or even people who just got on the wrong side of tests. Apparently Japan has just decided that there's no need to look far for undesirables when they can so expertly make them at home.
Of course we need ditches in the 21st century
Fletch on 2002-07-22T16:51:02
Where else are you going to run the fiber?
Devaluation
pudge on 2002-07-23T19:49:18
Want another truism? If you make it so everyone can go to school, it lowers the value of an education to be had there. That's not to say everyone shouldn't be educated, but it used to be hard to graduate from college. Before that, it was hard to graduate from high school. These days it is often easy to get a postgraduate degree. We lower our standards so everyone can graduate, and in the process inevitably make graduation meaningless.
Or to put it another way: our focus is far too heavily weighted on the end result of school -- some piece of paper -- instead of the process of education.
I went to college primarily to get a job. I said that on my way in, and on my way out. I wasn't even interested in an
education for the purposes of getting a job, but just the little piece of paper that came with it, because for most well-paying jobs, you need a college diploma. It doesn't matter what that paper says, as long as it exists, and so I was going to get one.
And perhaps expectedly, I did not take one class that related directly to my current vocation, and my most interesting and useful classes were electives. The rest of my classes were mostly factory classes, designed to make me a productive member of society. Of course, they failed.
;-)
I'd be happier if we failed more people from high school and college, or if we simply had fewer people bother trying. Actually, I'd really just like them to be difficult and challenging, and to fail people who don't succeed there. That may not mean more people fail; it may -- perish the thought! -- mean that all the graduates end up with a better education. At the least, it should mean that the people who
do graduate are better off, with a better education, with fewer years of their lives wasted. Either way, it's all good.
I want everyone to be educated as much as anyone else does. But more diplomas doesn't equate to more education.
Bloody hell!
pdcawley on 2002-07-24T08:35:46
I agree with that 100%. Pinch me.
