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links 🏴
@links
Hot take: Educational institutions should NOT pursue meritocracy and excellence. They should pursue furthering humanity’s collective knowledge.
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justin.ahn.eth
@ahn.eth
so then who gets to/should go to college?
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links 🏴
@links
People who want to learn new things. The real answer is more nuanced - there was a distinction in the past that universities were for cutting edge research and colleges are for practical knowledge (ie go to college to get a job), but these distinctions have ceased to exist. Getting a job has outcompeted furthering knowledge. So every higher education institution’s main value is to help students get jobs. This has some terrible downstream effects, including making higher education essentially mandatory if you want to make money and pushing our youth into only specific kinds of jobs.
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justin.ahn.eth
@ahn.eth
so should anyone who "wants to learn new things" be admitted to a college without any kind of qualifications or credentialism? and then what should that cost and who foots the bill? personally do think that the institutionalization of higher education as a necessity for "white collar" jobs should be dismantled, for sure. but also do think that people should have the agency to understand, especially in this day and age, that you can simply just do things
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wylin
@wylin
i gotta disagree to an extent in college as the barrier white collar jobs i’m particularly thinking of the field of architecture. it used to be that the requirement for licensure was a degree + experience + passing tests, or you could just get a job under a licensed architect and gain experience + pass tests the apprenticeship pathway was removed, and the field (+ humanity) has suffered as a result it used to be common for young, intelligent men to transition from being a blue collar construction worker to an architect’s apprentice. the practical experience of actually building things & reading blueprints in the field gave a perspective that architects simply don’t have anymore enshittification by distance from the actual thing & no application of theory by the practitioners
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links 🏴
@links
Did I say that they should be admitted without any qualifications? Noooooo. That being said I do think things like MIT OpenCourseWare are a way to allow people to access education at low cost, and that’s a good thing. I get that meritocracy and excellence are values in education, but making them the point of college doesn’t serve society IMHO. As for who foots the bill - anyone who is sufficiently remarkable doesn’t pay for college, they get scholarships. This is how it’s worked since universities were invented.
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