Education

The biggest problem with education in our country is not the education. It’s the mindset about education; the misinformation and the backwards efforts to improve it.

You do not need a college degree to be successful. There, I said it. We have a multitude of opportunities and careers that can be obtained without ever stepping down that road to debt. Can we please stop pretending that these options don’t exist or that you’re doomed to work at Mickey D’s if you don’t go to college?

Before you get higher education, think of what getting a degree entails. Not in the, ‘I need a degree to get a job’ way but at the root of it– what should your education be doing.

Through high school, it’s a base line introduction to different types of thinking, a short flirting session with many types of information. You learn nothing because you’re not supposed to. It’s supposed to spark your creativity to learn a subject without actually telling you anything at all about any of the subjects that you flirt with.

Bachelors– finding a subject of interest and learning that you know so little that you don’t even know what you don’t know.

Masters– discovering what it is that you don’t know about said subject of interest.

Doctorates– learning how to self study and expand so that the areas that you don’t know decrease. Furthermore, learning how to find the answers to what you don’t know so that if you ever have to know, it is guaranteed that you could figure it out at that time.

You stop when you are satisfied with your level or realize that you don’t need to stay in school longer because you have picked up the purpose of the next degree without needing to study further.

But no one thinks like this anymore. People come in drones to colleges to get the essential BA, not knowing what subject they want, not knowing what career opportunities that it leads to, not knowing if said opportunities would satisfy them. They flounder until they get that certificate in their hands and then wonder if they learned anything and go onto the job market unable to apply their degree to a job, getting hired for work that they are incapable of completing correctly for they lack the proper understanding and training.

It’s nuts. And not because schools are corrupt or because teachers are bad though both may be true. We no longer understand the purpose of education. Instead of rectifying this, the focus is on manipulating how the information gets presented or switching who the instructor is; thinking new person, new style means better. But this… this is not true. Your education is dependent upon one thing only: you.

Welcome to America. The land of the uneducated educated elite.