I have a practical question about the seeming truism that a highly educated population is a good thing.
Our educational attainment rates have absolutely skyrocketed. The number of people with a bachelor's degree or higher is now comparable to the number that managed a high school degree in the 1950s. What would you say are the clear benefits we've really achieved from this? It's hard to disagree with a highly education population being a good thing, yet in practice I find myself able to list quite a lot of negatives relating to our sharp increases in educational attainment, but I'm not really sure what the positives are except in the most abstract terms.
The 'education' of today is starting to look more and more like job training.
However, education is meant to expand your mind and to teach you how to think critically.
Education is supposed to round you out, teach you about the history of your culture.
Adam Gopnik once wrote a piece for the New Yorker. The gist of it is that he was living in Paris, and his wife was pregnant with a girl, after having already had a boy. When French people found out about this the would always say to him: "Mais c'est le choix du roi!"[1]
Finally after a taxi driver said the same thing to him for the 10th time, he asked a bit exasperatedly, what it meant.
The point of the anecdote is that the taxi driver then proceeded to explain how under the Salic law governing the succession of French royalty, having a son followed by a girl had certain advantages.
I'd completely agree with you here about the ideal of education being meant to expand your mind and teaching one to think critically. But this is where we might begin to diverge a bit. Is this really happening in modern times? Do you associate fresh graduates with anything like critical thinking and breadth (let alone depth) of views and understanding?
We could blame this on our educational institutions of course. And I'd agree that our institutions have changed. But this gets into the question of why have they changed? And I think there we get back to the initial issue. As we see vastly more people pursuing post-secondary education, it means that the demographic of your average student is changing. Systems that worked and produced a certain tier of student when dealing with top e.g. 2% of society, cannot reasonably be expected to achieve the same or comparable results when dealing with more than 30% of society.
This is what made me ask the question. In principle I cannot disagree with the notion that an educated population is a good thing. But in practice, universities are seemingly giving it their all to make me rethink this view.
Our educational attainment rates have absolutely skyrocketed. The number of people with a bachelor's degree or higher is now comparable to the number that managed a high school degree in the 1950s. What would you say are the clear benefits we've really achieved from this? It's hard to disagree with a highly education population being a good thing, yet in practice I find myself able to list quite a lot of negatives relating to our sharp increases in educational attainment, but I'm not really sure what the positives are except in the most abstract terms.