Fred on Ed

No, not that Fred: this one.

I don’t always agree with Fred Reed, but it’s hard to disagree with his take on “higher education” in the U.S.

You’ve heard of Kaplan, which sells prep courses to subvert the SATs. You know, vocabulary lists, drills, that kind of thing. If you are too witless to have acquired a vocabulary by graduation from high school, you memorize a bunch of those word thingies with all those, like, letters in them, and forget them the day after the test, but you’re in.

Which is what the universities want. Universities are about tuition. The money of the barely sentient spends as well as any other, and there are more of them. Like all businesses, the schools, if such they are, want to expand their customer base. They want to spread the wondrous radiance of cultivation over the autistic, the anencephalic, and perhaps the dead, who might be taught by channeling. Pets, arthropods, outcroppings of rock. Furniture. Rosy O’Donnell. George Bush. The potential clientele is large. Empty space, perhaps.

As it turns out, who would have thought it, some kids don’t have vocabularies, and largely don’t have brains, and either can’t read real books or would rather be poisoned, and consequently are totally incapable of study in a university. Thus the pressing need to get them there. It doesn’t make economic sense that a university should lose twenty K a year because some wretched prole can’t read Dick and Jane.

Read the rest at the link.

It’s doubly unfortunate that so many kids who are intellectually (and ethically–more on that another time perhaps*) unsuited to a real college education are steered toward college and away from meaningful work that suits them, because it not only cheats them, it cheats those who are suited, by the process of dumbing classes down to the level that dummies (or even just those who’d otherwise be out of their depth) need to survive.

Oh, well. The ones who are suited to real college work can always make their way to the library and play a few rounds of autodidacticism.

Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Woman Honor Thyself, The World According to Carl, Shadowscope, The Pink Flamingo, Phastidio.net, Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, The Amboy Times, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

*Yeh, ethically. First, no work ethic. Getting spoonfed in high school leading to the situation Fred outlines in the opening comment above. Then, outright dishonesty: bone up for a “test” that’s supposedly designed to assess what they’ve learned to that point (instead of actually, well, learning anything). And those are just the ethical “high” points… *sigh*)