The Religion of Modern Education Revisited

My post The Religion of Modern Education was published in 2012. It remained one of my top posts for years, in spite of my posting other content. This post links to topics in my project with executive coaching pioneer Julian Moody. The topic "Misguided Educators and Parents" in which Julian and I discuss trade schools as an alternative to college, a discussion we had in 2008, continues to get traffic.

This year, the Wall Street Journal published articles questioning the post-secondary education paradigm. 

Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College: Three generations of ‘college for all’ in the U.S. has left most families looking for alternatives.

How Gen Z Is Becoming the Toolbelt Generation: More young workers are going into trades as disenchantment with the college track continues.

These articles were top-ranking on the WSJ site, particularly the second article, which was WSJ's number one article the week it was published.

This topic obviously strikes a nerve. There is a collective disenchantment with college education and its usefulness relative to cost in time and money.

It would be one thing if students going through this system were actually learning and becoming educated. Most teachers on the tenure track are preoccupied with publish or perish at the expense of teaching and giving students individual attention. Non-tenure track professors, who comprise more than half of college faculty on most campuses, are now dependent on student reviews for job security. The average grade in many colleges has become an A-.

And like a religious system overseen by Pharisees, it resists any change that usurps achieved position and security and is hell-bent on self-preservation. To quote the first WSJ article: 

"About one in 40 U.S. workers draws a paycheck from a college or university, and in recent decades the powerful higher-education lobby in Washington has quashed dozens of proposals to measure the sector’s successes and failures."

In the interest of maintaining their existence and elitism, these institutions perpetuate the myth that more education is always better. This unwieldy, leavened dough, containing the proverbial yeast of the Pharisees, has grown steadily since the post-war years, and like the Blob from the 1958 sci-fi horror movie, it has financially consumed and wrecked many people.  

(Posted 4/30/24)