Nerd News: Heresy -- Not Everyone Should Go to College -- Plus a Rant!

Or should "go to university," in the Britspeak of this editorialist.

I've talked about this idea before in its American guise, usually in the terms of academic standards and the toxic school debt/cost of education factor. The idea that everybody should go to college is a product of politicians and edu-crats, and it's just as noxious as the idea that everybody should own a house.

For today, though, see what one British observer has to say about the British version of "everybody should go to college -- um, I mean, UNIVERSITY." Blurb:

A peasants' revolt broke out on BBC Radio 4 today, when a discussion on education provoked a flood of calls and e-mails expressing some seriously politically incorrect opinions. Untutored listeners wanted to know who on earth thought it was a sensible aspiration to try to send 50 per cent of British youth to university. If degrees meant anything, how could half of the population possibly be qualified to obtain them?

You may be sure the subject was changed fairly quickly, but the seed of rebellion had been sown. It is an article of faith with New Labour and all its social-engineering fellow travellers that half of the population must go to university, regardless of academic ability, in pursuit of the holy grail of "fairness". For true believers, this is simply the reformist prelude to the revolutionary goal of eventually sending 100 per cent of teenagers to university.

All the problems afflicting academe - funding, standards, etc - are a consequence of attempting to convert higher education from the exclusive, minority, elitist experience it ought to be into a mass-market, box-ticking egalitarian confidence trick perpetrated on an industrial scale. To give the admissions procedure a patina of credibility, school examinations have been rigged so that numbskulls can emerge garlanded with academic laurels. University degrees have correspondingly been devalued - a 'First', formerly a badge of excellence, is now given away like a free offer on a packet of cereal. Teenagers are being admitted to university who would fail the interview for the post of village idiot.

Ouch! And yet I do love reading British English penned by an angry writer.

A university degree is fast becoming a measure of . . . hm, nothing. meanwhile, Merit is no longer a means for people to get ahead in life. (And this ultimately acts to prevent people from less wealthy backgrounds from improving their lot in life through working hard and studying hard. The entire morass is so utterly contrary to the old Taiwanese -- and indeed Asian -- idea of emphasizing education that I can't even begin to rant.)

Add a dash of evil old-fashioned envy and the denigration of excellence in others (only now it's OK to mock people smarter/better/etc. than you are if you just use the term "self-esteem"), and we're seeing academia's suicide. What you're seeing in education is the nerds' version of old-school communism, really: the people in power won't be happy until everybody is equally mediocre and mush-brained (as communists aren't happy until everybody is equally poor and miserable). Truly excellent, hard-working scholars are the new kulaks on campus.

You know, university has historically had a sense of elitism to it, and I'll go ahead and be wicked and say that it should. It's not for everybody. It's for the high achievers, for the brainy and diligent boys and girls (notice that I said it's about brains, talent, and labor, not about personal wealth per se -- that's another issue. But that's actually my point about merit-based approaches -- about scholarships to be won by merit by students who have no personal wealth of their own, so they can study for a real degree and improve their lot in life. But if you take that option away -- as edu-crats are doing by swamping campuses with mediocrity and plummeting standards -- then you end up hurting those people.) A college degree should mean something. Actual education and learning should mean something. An aside on a symptom: there's a goofy habit in teaching of saying that the teacher is not the dispenser of knowledge but the "faciliator" to help students learn from each other in cooperative efforts, etc. RUBBISH. Self-esteem-drenched rubbish. I'm the teacher because I know more than the students do -- and that's my job (oooooh, did that sound all elitist and oppressive? Am I crushing you with my power structure? boo freakin' hoo)! If two students are ignorant about history, how much actual history do you think they can learn from each other without a real history teacher being the dispenser of knowledge? without a serious teacher sometimes bruising their precious little egos by saying, "NO, YOU'RE WRONG"?

And lest you think I'm being a rich elitist snob on this whole college admissions business... I got into college and grad school on merit and sweat; in fact, it's my slice of the American Dream -- that an immigrant's daughter with absolutely no money and no social connections at all can work hard, earn scholarships, get into a good school, and support herself independently doing it. You can multiply this out too for a lot of my friends -- like the Vietnamese boat-people refugees who came to the US with literally nothing, but are now successful professionals thanks not to some big nanny government social engineering project, but because of their own hard work and talent -- IN SCHOOL. This is precisely the sort of academic outcome we all need and should encourage, but it's also precisely the sort of thing that edu-cratic meddling will damage or -- heaven forbid -- destroy. It's already begun with the grading wars and the fact that a "A" no longer means what it should because too many people get them even when they don't deserve them. (This isn't true in the classrooms where I -- and fellow unrepentant intellectual dinosaurs like me -- rule with an iron fist in the gradebook and do crazy things like demand real work and results, but it's happening too often in other classrooms. And as evil as I am and awe-inspiring in the length and breadth of my campus blasphemies, I'm still only one person! *giggle*) End of rant.

For related posts, click on the various blog tags. You can also see my latest rant on the ongoing idiotification of higher ed, mangled with government interference.