College Degrees are Useless

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Submitted by lloyd on June 18, 2006 - 11:50am.

There are men in corporate life and in Congress that are busy destroying your kid’s education while you watch the unpaid balance go through the roof. Why is the future of our country being sold off like some calf at an auction? It’s so the top 1% of the population can have their Swiss bank accounts swell with each passing day.

Yes, the money you’re spending is as worthless as Confederate currency after the Civil War. In order for your kids to reap the benefit of their education they’ll have to accept job offers under $5,000/year to compete with Asian PhDs who can live on $5-10/day because of the area of the world they live. A PC and an internet connection make every poor person on earth competitors of your kids. So when you hear politicians say our kids need a first class education to compete in the new world market, they are lying.

Even jobs that do not require a degree are being destroyed by millions of illegal immigrants flooding across our borders, offering to work under minimum wage, which already can’t provide a living.

Let’s invite the CEOs to join the jobs they are so anxious to send out of the country. From now on; the Chairman of the Board, all Board of Directors members, and all upper management are to be expelled from our country along with their families for the balance of their lives. They think Mexico or China is so great---so move there and stay there. America doesn’t need traitors living the good life while the rest of America has to sell their belongings to buy food. And take the entire Congress with you, you know who your buddies are, the ones that said yes to NAFTA and are busy lining up to pass CAFTA.

There’s not much left of what was the greatest country on earth. At least we should have the satisfaction of seeing all the traitors pack up and leave, never to return.

Before you think Americans are the only victims of greed in the US, Mexicans call NAFTA SHAFTA because of millions of farmers that lost their land to corporations in lowering the prices to the point of starving the farmers off the land. Throughout the world international corporations, most with headquarters in the US or the Cayman Islands, are stripping the natural resources and lowering the wages of indigenous people to a level of starvation, why? For the additional wealth of the top 1% who can’t seem to get enough money, no matter how much they have.

The world is evolving quickly into a slave planet. The New World Order may not have wars, but being alive will lose whatever meaning it has now.

Posted in CAFTA · College degrees · NAFTA · Phd | lloyd's blog · delicious · digg · reddit · 424 reads »

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sorry, bro ...

#58766 On June 18, 2006 1:08pm o ceallaigh said,
o ceallaigh's picture

compete with Asian PhDs who can live on $5-10/day because of the area of the world they live.

But this doesn't last. Used to be we could say this of Japanese persons. Now they make as much money as we do. The Japanese exported much of their work to Korea. Then they got too expensive, and the focus shifted to Malaysia and PR China. And, in fact, to the US, 'cause our labor was actually cheaper than theirs. It's a dynamic system - and our energies are better spent mastering it than carping about it.

all upper management are to be expelled from our country along with their families

Very cathartic. And dead wrong. Ask the Brits - who did this de facto in the 60s and 70s with punitive tax rates. You might also ask the Russians and the Cambodians after their purges of the intellectual and mercantile elites in the 30s and 70s. I am no trickle-down economists, but, like it or not, these people often are drivers, making things happen when others couldn't. Or refused to. There's a reason they're rich and I'm not. They will simply hie themselves off to Monaco or the Cayman Islands and, at worst, enjoy themselves (and at best, enrich the communities in which they live with cash and culture), while the societies that expelled them wither. There are ways to encourage the rich to respect the rest of us (see Roosevelt, F. D.; Mandela, N.). Driving them out ain't one of 'em.

when you hear politicians say our kids need a first class education to compete in the new world market, they are lying.

Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. On this they are completely right and we are wrong. We went wrong when we established an adversarial rather than a cooperational relationship with our schools, especially our primary and secondary schools. In the nations with which we are now competing, there is no question but that the teacher is in charge of the classroom. There is no question that the material that the teacher is presenting is of value. There is no question that when a teacher enforces discipline in the classroom, it is because the student (and by extension the community) has failed to learn discipline. The shame that would attach to a family that sent a child to 1st grade without having mastered toilet training would be devastating. Here, it's Bush's fault that Joey crapped his pants.

Are we wasting our money sending children to college? In most cases, probably. Because most of what those children are learning in college should have been mastered in high school. Hell, IN GRADE SCHOOL!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, we are, in my opinion, losing the battle with overseas nations. Because they know what's at stake and we don't. They are prepared to do what is necessary and we aren't. Chances are we won't see this until the good things we have truly have been taken away, either by grab or by their being priced out of our reach. As if that isn't happening already. And the reason for it (tell me if you haven't heard this from me before) shaves or applies makeup with you in the bathroom every morning.

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O Callaigh's Interesting Comment

#58774 On June 18, 2006 8:21pm Home-remedies said,

I just spent an hour writing a comment to o callaigh's comment. I clicked on the formatting guidelines to see how to change something and then lost the whole thing. Drat! Double Drat!!

Now I am too tired to start over. Enjoyed it anyway. You had some interesting opinions OC. What do you think of Bush's "No Child Left Behind" policy?

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You mean "the Education President"?

#58776 On June 18, 2006 9:25pm o ceallaigh said,
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That was one of GWB's 2000 campaign slogans/pledges, was it not?

Actually, on this matter I'm having a hard time sorting heat from light, fact from urban legend. My overall impression, which goes beyond any specific program, is that the whole debate misses the point.

That's because I perceive the so-called neoconservative agenda to be "make sure that Johnny can read". And be sure that I can test Johnny to be sure that he can read. Also, make sure Johnny has mastered (read "memorized") a set of facts. And be sure that I can test Johnny to be sure he can recover these facts at my command.

The so-called "liberal" agenda is "make sure Johnny can think". Or, perhaps more accurately, create. The creative mind, so goes the theory, will go find the facts it needs.

The one, when taken to its logical extreme, gives you people with plenty of tools to think with but can't do anything because they don't have anything to think about. Until somebody (like a CEO or a dictator) gives them that. Oh by the way, this was what drove the invention of universal public education in these United States in the early 1800s in the first place. Forget the noble words. The idea was to create a cadre of people who could read the instructions on the new machines and were drilled to be punctual (to fit the factory schedule), frugal (so they could survive on the pennies a millenium the factory owners were willing to pay), and sober (so that between literacy and sobriety they could actually run the machines without killing themselves and - the only point that matters - gumming up the works with their bodily fluids and making down time).

The other gives you plenty of people who have wonderful things that they think about but they can't do anything with them because they don't have the tools to think about them with. That proposal might well describe the universal elixir for cancer, but we'll never know 'cause the paper was written in a language that hasn't been revealed yet.

The answer should be obvious. Teach both things together. Train the skills in ways that encourage those being educated to exercise both their rote learning abilities and their creativity. Simple. But expensive. Requires low student/teacher ratios so that each child gets the attention and positive support needed to master these skills. Requires skilled and dedicated teachers to deliver the skills - ones who aren't second-guessed at every turn by everybody from the Principal to the seagulls on the roof. And get more in salary than the seagulls. Will We the People pay for any such thing? Hell no! Unless you're a magnate in a gated community, of course. Can't have the good stuff let out to the unwashed masses now can we? What we will pay for is the right to jack our teachers around mercilessly.

Back in the 60s, teachers resented bitterly the changeover in educational practice from "rote learning" to "creativity-based" approaches. Why? 'Cause they hated liberals? No, I submit that it was far more fundamental. Effective teaching is not a mass-produceable item. It is an amalgam of theory and practice, the understanding of a subject matter and how to deliver it to a bunch of kids who are only working at this 'cause you told them to, they'd far rather be outside shooting marbles. It takes years to develop a strategy that works, that gets the kids to take in the material and keeps them from tearing down the walls and keeps you from tearing out your hair. You finally got it all down. And them some smartass from State U. takes away all of your texts and lesson plans, tells you they all suck, and demands that you start over.

So the teachers started over, and got it all sorted out so that they could get the kids to take in something intelligent and keep them from tearing down the walls and you from tearing out your hair. And then some smartass from the Department of Education takes away all of your texts and ... do I have to go on?

The bottom line is, our competitor nations have gotten the message. Their teachers are, especially in comparison with American counterparts, highly paid and well respected. The ethos is that, if Johnny can't read, it's your fault, the child's and the parent's, not God's or the Government's. There are (or were, some years ago) few social stigmas more devastating in Japan than to be the parent of a "failed boy". The threat of such a stigma provides a wonderful incentive to achievement. It also yields high suicide rates. But theoretically we are intelligent enough to figure out a system that will give us the one without enduring the other. But we'd have to agree to work within it. And pay for it.

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All the facets have been well presented.

#58789 On June 19, 2006 5:37am multisubj said,

Solutions are to be searched.

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