i am told that we have a limit, so i will try and be a good boy! (multiple responses herein):
On Mon, 18 Sep 2000 17:52:44 -0500, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>>> hey, don't knock academia. it is about the only remaining place
>>> where that college degree will do you some good!
>
> I missed this the first time. Apparently AC is unaware that
> the demand for a degree has *never* been based on the
> assumption that the degree reflects mastery of a usable
> skill.
prolly not. the myths they teach us!
now, for those who don't know me, that was basically a smartass comment, but it does characterize something that i believe: education (at present) is still designed to produce good little industrial worker bees. we have an assembly-line education system for an assembly-line economy. but we no longer have that assembly-line economy.
what we need from our educational institutions is to reward independent thought (perhaps even original thought), to "teach" students how to think, to help them adapt to assimilating a great deal of information quickly, to analyze it prompting and to make decisions upon the information at hand. rote skills may have trained brains to do rote work, but burger flipping seems to be about the only rote work available nowadays...
> Degrees are a mere convenience to the personnel departments
> of corporations.
the same thing can be said of the credentials that kelley desires.
the problem that i have seen, either as an owner of a business or as someone who has a lot of contact with other owners in my field, is that -- outside of the self-taught employee -- employees are utterly unequipped for the demands of business today (at least in the computing field). the top three complaints: not enough math skills, not literate enough, can't think otj. but then, i always was a little naive...
Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> added:
>
>That educational institutions function primarily as a screening
>device (or an adjunct to human resources departments of firms) and
>only secondarily produce "skills" (if they do so at all) becomes
>strikingly obvious
hmmm, i think you are overlooking the entire conditioning process that allowed workers in the industrial economy to live with what they were doing. no thinking required. the rote nature of assembly-line education gave credience to the level of exact or minute specialization that adam smith described.
Reese <reeza at flex.com> kindly admonished:
>
>
>>i keep trying to understand exactly where kelley is coming
>> from.
> Try reading her, rather than attempting to interpret her
> after reading 2 or 3 lines.
thanks, bud, i will try and remember that...
>> ultimately, kelley's problem is that she is trying to wedge
>> hacker/coders into a comfortable paradigm so that she can
>> explain (or understand?) it. it is not professional. it is
>> *not* peer-reviewed (the whole concept of beta-testing is
>> contrary to the elite nature of peer-review).
>
> Go ask on c'punks, if anyone actually reviews the source for
> pgp when http://www.pgpi.org posts it.
reese, *my* point is that code is *not* peer-reviewed. and we all think that free-source encryption should be...
nevertheless, that takes us off the track. kelley's desire to see credentialing misses the point that hacking is a mindset, not a profession.
And on Tue, 19 Sep 2000 08:05:28 -0400 (EDT), Matt Cramer <cramer at unix01.voicenet.com>
added:
>
>> nearly every word matt uttered sounded like esr.
>
> *spit* You mean esr sounds like Matt. :-)
>
> esr does echo good points (although he fits as "ankle biter"
> quite well), but he certainly didn't originate them. Neither
> did I, but then I'm not pimping myself to the media.
>
> I hadn't realised esr had affected the outsiders' perceptions
> of open source to the degree you indicate. I had considered
> him inconsequential.
as did i...
ac
'''
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| the geek shall |
| inherit the earth |
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