The original idea behind school isn't to educate the masses. Why would a factory worker need to know calculus and Shakespeare? He needs to read the clock and timetables, be on time, wake up in the morning early enough to be punctual, ...
Likewise higher education isn't about the thinks you learn. It is about learning methods to learn. If you can learn the nitrogen cycle, you can learn our scrum statuses. If you can hand in your homework in time, you can keep our deadlines.
This isn't to say the system is good, but it helps to understand it when you want to criticize it.
103But learning to critically question statements and judging them yourself (which requires some knowledge, for example you can't question anti-vaxxers when you don't know anything about how vaccines work) instead of simply believing them is extremely important in a democracy.
42I have watched YouTube videos of smart people reading a smart book that basically said that our education system has the focus on learning facts which gives us a submissive attitude. It gives us a feeling of passivity, of the silent observer.
That said, I realize that the system is getting better in the sense that it tries to evoke curiosity and makes kids to explorers instead of observers if that makes sense. Also, as someone who got interested in history only after school, I know that basic knowledge is important and bad if missing. Than again, why didn't school make me want to know stuff.
10There’s ample evidence to show that no one learns critical thinking in college. At best, you select for people who are better at it.
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Cant you find out the answer for these questions with a series of short tests?
I once applied for a job at IBM and instead of an initial interview they sent me a series of interactive tests to check my skills. I ended up moving to another country and didn't follow through, but still liked this approach.
Also in the EU I can see lots of job listings are using now a system where you either have a certain type of education/degree or a certain previous experience to be eligible to apply.
Still you need to have knowledge of the specific field, but technically if you started at the bottom with an entry level low skill job you can get higher with experience alone and without a university degree.
14Can they? Yes. Absolutely. 100%.
A local factory likes people with college degrees, any degree, no matter what college or course, but also offer tests twice a year in large groups for exactly the reason that plenty y of people are qualified, and can do everything they need, but never went to college.
Will they? Probably not unless it's a niche employer. Why bother going through the extra effort when you can just say "degrees only" and turn your nose up at anyone without one?
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The original idea behind school isn't to educate the masses. Why would a factory worker need to know calculus and Shakespeare? He needs to read the clock and timetables, be on time, wake up in the morning early enough to be punctual, ...
In certain country reading clock and timetables was deemed not enough for factory worker.
4Ah, Elementary through Highschool teaches you to be an employee.
Higher education is being sold dreams and taking on debt to learn to be a better employee. Sounds about right.
I teach myself new complex skills all the time, but I imagine I'm still written off a ton because I didn't pay for at least the four year license to learn to learn. Lol
(I want to emphasize I'm being playfully sarcastic about our clown world society and not attacking you, you are very correct about needing to understand before one critiques!)
4No offense taken. That's about the criticism I had in mind
5Well that's about the system in the USA or some third world countries. Locking higher education behind a paywall only helps to keep the population uneducated, combine that with no focus on critical thinking in school and you get a population that's easy to control and to polarise.
Of course politicians like Trump (or pseudo-democracies or straight up autocratic regimes in third world countries) really benefit from an easily-convinced population that's not questioning them too much, so, given how strong the republicans currently are, that sadly probably won't change anytime soon.
At some point they'll realise that they need free or at least very affordable education to stay internationally competitive...
3Higher education is being sold dreams and taking on debt to learn to be a better employee. Sounds about right.
Don't be worse than Russia. Please fix.
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Don't forget blind obendience!
1Okay but at that point high school has proven that.
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The same energy as "entry level job, 10 years of work experience needed".
62I had terrible imposter syndrome when I landed a sw dev job. I thought everyone could tell that I didn't belong. I was / am self-taught. Everyone had CS degrees. I thought I was a fraud. I later recalibrated to realize that I'd earned it even harder without a degree. But I had to get that spot to be able to leverage my knowledge. There are probably people who know a lot more than me getting rejected because they don't have the right credentials.
36Brother, recently i landed my first official job as system administrator (I'm still in university as EE), even though i know almost all things, i just don't know nuances of how they adapted these technologies we know of in their specific case, and i am too felt terrible imposter syndrome
4I never managed to land a job in the field but of the 4 interviews I ever got actually related to IT every single one mentioned that I was technically overqualified for these entry-level jobs despite never officially going to school or working in IT, one of them called and had the lead back-ens guy come and sit in since I was a potential fit for an entirely different and much higher up role
Of course that's probably the reason I was never hired over other options (as well as why I didn't get many interviews, who wants the guy with 0 education if the other 20 applicants do?) and so now every time I do IT work for home I just get super sad. It's taking a lot of therapy to undo that and it's not reeeeally working lol
4CS degrees, at least in my experience, prep you for a bunch of things that honestly don't matter too much. Like, I don't think knowing what P versus NP means really helps me at my job. I think learning to use build tools and frameworks rather than just the language itself would've been more useful.
The best professor I had in that regard at college was younger and also working at a "real" company while also teaching (I believe he was getting a master's degree). He taught us about Spring and Maven and had us make a REST API. The only downside is that this course was about making GUIs and the majority of it was about Swing which nobody really uses. I have a feeling he added the other assignment because it was.more relevant to things most folks do with Java.
3It's because computer science degrees aren't really programming degrees.
A computer science degree sets you up to be a scientist, most common dev jobs are just glorified Lego sets patching libraries together and constructing queries. There is skill, knowledge, and effort in those jobs, but they are fundamentally different.
Most common software dev jobs are closer to the end user than not.
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Don't think I've ever actually heard a company say "forget everything you learned in college".
27You don't work where I work then.
Family-owned business. Realizes they're behind-the-ball on technology and practices. Hires college-educated & outside people to make suggestions.
"Well none of that makes sense to us. Forget all that and do it our way."
"That way is wrong."
"Well it's our business, we'll do it how we want."
Then they get all <surprised pikachu> when the talented people get burnt out and quit after a few weeks. Eventually it's "well these kids just don't want to work hard like we do."
12From what I understand it's fairly common in engineering, but less of a forget everything you learned and more of a that’s all gonna be pretty much useless in the context of the specific job you're doing so just pay attention to the training
6I can recall employers saying something along the lines of "don't think you know everything about business because you just got a business degree" but that's mostly about the attitude some new grads have.
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2because they don't
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Its not about learning, its about paying your dues to the church of capitalism
25For the US, id certainly agree with you. College is free here and some employers require it (less and less though). A coworker once told me a degree shows you can be serious for one thing and see it through. It shows you are capable of achieving a goal.
12I believe your coworker is right to some extent. Getting a degree is a lot of work. It demonstrates your ability to do work and get things done.... Among other things.
Having any degree/post secondary diploma, generally says you have the ability to work on something without being forced into it. IMO, HS is generally expected and more or less forced on everyone, so it doesn't really count.
While I believe that's the motivation behind needing a degree to get a job, I also, personally, don't agree with it. There's plenty of hardworking people who never even considered college/uni after HS. Some of them are much more motivated and hardworking than the people I knew from my time in college.
I work in IT, and see degree requirements on all sorts of job postings. It's bullshit, since there's haven't been IT centric degrees until very recently, outside of CS/development. Most of these jobs don't require any programming whatsoever. They'll be for helpdesk, system administration, networking, etc. Programming knowhow might help but it's definitely not required. I don't need Java, or C++, or Python, or any other language to know how to click buttons on dialogs in Windows.
4
Imo university most important task is to teach you the basics and how to accumulate and use the knowledge you need to do a job.
15Yeah, some of the computer science theory I learned occasionally comes in handy when I'm reasoning about problems or when I'm picking apart some spec. My husband who attended a code school instead is a perfectly apt developer, but he struggles more. College also just gave me the time and resources to get a survey of knowledge outside of formal coursework. On the job, I tend to go more in-depth on topics closely related to the job.
8That's what school is for.
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13- college doesn't teach much.
- college is still useful tho. It does require some determination and persistence to get through, or at least tolerance for dealing with. "This is the way to learn" junk.
- most actually useful knowledge is gained on the job
- I think most people fresh out of high school aren't ready for a real job, but college grads are barely ready too to be honest. Hyper generalized and i bet most people reading this are actually very qualified, that said I've met many college grads interning with us who just don't have the fortitude to do it just yet, hopefully by their second job they've grown accustomed to the dumb way of life we all call work.
12You sound like a hiring manager that puts x years of experience required on an entry level position.
1Lols. Yea i actually hate that. No i gave been begging my org to just treat interns differently and actually help them rather than let them sink or swim. Most of the interns we get are expected to know all the ins and outs, but they are just kids yet basically. So i think hiring managers honestly should lower the bar and then the org needs to properly train and teach them to get em up to speed. Maybe it takes six months but it's about time we start investing in our people.
1
We need to figure out college in the US. There's way too much dead weight meant to justify tuition in most programs. I'm sorry but I don't need to know how to write research papers to do half the fields taught in college. Dropping that dead weight would make college far more attainable for so many people.
If we can't stop businesses from requiring degrees, and we can't, then we need a hard look at what's in a degree.
Also, the government needs to back off requiring degrees for so much stuff too. For example they want a degree to tell people nearing retirement age what their options are and to do the paperwork. I'm sorry but that's not what college is about. Unless there's a technical need that cannot be fulfilled with certifications or practical tests, (code a coffee machine for me, and build the stack), it should not require a degree.
Going by job listings you'd think literally everyone other than construction, military, retail, food, and security, has a degree.
3"Forget everything you know about slipcovers!"
2Me, reads comments: Man there's a lot more of the 'college ain't nuthin' but debt and a piece of paper' people on Lemmy than I thought there were.
Ya'll are just trying to overcompensate for feeling inadequate about not going to college. If you don't go, don't go. It's not for everyone. But don't shit on and downplay the people who have the talent and ability to do so.
"It just teaches you do be a useful tool of the machine!" yeah that's exactly what someone who didn't go or shouldn't have went to college would think.
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