We need education reform. In this country the average age to graduate from school is 25 and it’s trending toward 30. Our country’s reluctance to tell anyone they didn’t make the cut has caused a massive reduction in standards across the board in education. This reduction of standards has watered down the value of each level educational attainment — thus causing the need for higher levels of education to compete for the same job. This need for higher levels of education and our country’s reluctance to tell anyone they didn’t make the cut has led to a lowering of standards that “doesn’t leave anyone behind” which has watered down the value of that level of educational attainment….
This maddness has got to stop! “Not everyone is college material” used to be a meaningful phrase from days gone by… it has been replaced with not everyone is phD calaber material because soon you will need a phD to get a normal professional career job… or perhaps just a Masters and a Law Degree… Which would be great if it still meant what it used to mean to attain those degrees. Instead we are “educating” people for 30 years to be able to effectively maintain the status quo in a middle management job. We should be trending towards full education by 20 years old. Imagine the economic benefits for the individual and the country. Instead of lowering standards and letting everyone through – which forces the first half of each institutions curriculum to merely reteach everything that you should have learned in your passed institution and hope that you learn it this time -we should be raising them. Then at least 50% of schooling could litterally be thrown away without any sacrific in lost knowledge. For instance, instead of having 2 years of “core” classes during undergrad that reteach everything that should have been learned in high school – instead of reteaching everyone – we would only re-teach those that didn’t learn it the first time. And we re-teach them where they should have learned it: in high school.
To use a fake example: The institute of running shouldn’t have their walking class slowed down by people that haven’t learned how to crawl, because they didn’t learn it in the crawling classes offered at the walking institute due to the fact that no one is held back at the institute for crawling lest we hurt someone’s feelings. I mean why hurt someone’s feelings when we can undermine the entire educational structure instead. The crawling institute should teach crawling. The walking institute should teach only walking as there exists another institute to teach crawling and if you need to learn to crawl you should go there. Same with the running institute. Only running. No remedial walking courses. You want to learn to walk go there. When you are ready to run come here.
We should move people through an educational system because they have mastered what we were teaching them – not because they have become a year older.