The Changing Face of Education

I was talking with a friend recently about how university education isn’t as prestigious as it once was and how the times have changed. When my parents went to university, it seemed as it if a university had the connotation that it was reversed for those types of people who were truly “intellectual” and wanted to pursue academics. However, for those type of people who wanted to simply learn a trade or go into the workspace, college was a better choice. College didn’t have the kind of “bad” stigma that it does today – where one assumes that only “stupid” or “dumb” kids graduating from university go to college.

            To be honest, I think the system is better this way. There seemed to be a clearer divide between where to go depending on what you wanted to do. Nowadays, it seems like university have blurred that line worst than using the Photoshop tool on it.  Most teenagers I know just go to university, in basically ANY program, because it’s what it is expected of them. However, I, and it seems many other people I’ve talked to (okay I’m only really talking about discussing this with Heinz here), seem to think that university education isn’t even needed. What does it matter? Unless you are doing academic research, most skills for a specific job can be learned in a few months or at most a year. In fact, I believe that learning things like chemistry, physics and math are only really "practical" if your job ends up involving research in those fields or else, while it is interesting, why does it really matter? Heinz agreed that the only jobs that really need schooling are those who are professionals – like doctors or lawyers and need to learn a SET of skills. Yes, yes, I know I am generalizing but I think overall most of what learns in university isn’t even used in the “real world”. Even this engineer I had to interview for an assignment once mentioned that he only used about 5-10% of what he learned in university once he started working.

            I think it’d be a step forward in society if educational institutions had more clearer boundaries so people go decide where they’d want to go. But, I think the face of the university education will change in my lifetime. Or, at least, I hope it does. Recently, Harvard and MIT have been offering free online courses to anyone who cares to take them. While this obviously isn’t as accredited today as actually attending a university, maybe this is where our society is heading. Maybe, our society could head towards self-directed learning after high school through online courses that anyone could take and then…apply for jobs? I don’t know – I guess I haven’t completely thought it out. But I think our current educational structure has to, and will, change.

Relationships and Age

It’s been a while since I went to a typical dinner party with my family. Now that I’m back home for the long weekend, I ended up going to my first one in a long time. It wasn’t much different than how I remember – the food was good, but the conversation was pretty mundane. As per usual, the topics the “adults” always seemed to talk about seemed superficial and never seemed to interest me. But then I started thinking – it wasn’t just about the “topics” that didn’t interest me but rather the whole cordial tone of the conversation. It was hard to imagine that these were what I would say were my parents “so called” best friends and yet their conversations seemed so much…less shallow than how I felt when I converse with my friends. Is this the fate I would be ultimately doomed to as well?

            Now, of course, there are several reasonable explanations for this. For one, I’m not my parents and maybe they really do enjoy this type of talking. Secondly, maybe I’m just biased because the topics they do talk about in general don’t interest me. But I  think it’s rather depressing that adults seem to talk about things that are less “deep” and focus on the bigger picture – almost everything they talk about it just centered on their lives or jobs or how their kids are doing etc. Why does it seem like as we get older we lose our ability to talk about things bigger than ourselves? Why do we never have those conservations where we talk about what we want to be when we grow up or in a few years? Is it because we’ve already got there? Is there nothing left?

            I hate to imagine myself in 10 or 15 years as the kind of person who can’t just sit down with a friend and talk about, REALLY talk about, how I feel about my life and society and the universe. I feel as the years go by these invisible walls separating the deepest part of us from others slowly are built up. We seem less reluctant to share who we really are, because who we really are has been buried under layers of societal indoctrination. Is the only ray of light the possibility of having a significant other whom we can share these things with? Or has everything sacred been stripped away by the machine that is modern society?