> Sometimes, though, I think that education might actually improve if
> it was sold on the model of tropical cruises. Students or parents or
> the government pays for degrees (paid in a lump sum or installments),
> depending on students' financial statuses. The payment guarantees a
> degree, regardless of how many or how few courses a student takes
> (it's like a tourist paying for the entire cruise package regardless
> of how many meals she actually consumes). And absolutely no grading.
> The only requirement for students is that they are NOT allowed to
> work for wages while in college (the government pays modest but
> adequate living stipends to all students who need them), for a
> minimum of four years, the main point being to take young people out
> of the labor market (which, like old age pensions that allow workers
> to retire, should have a happy effect of forcing real wages up) and
> give them completely free time to do what they want. Naturally, only
> students who are truly motivated to study, for their burning love of
> knowledge, show up in your class. Students are happy -- some just
> carouse, many date and mate, a select few study hard (because they
> love to!), and yet others do politics full-time. Teachers are
> ecstatic -- no deadwood in a classroom! :->
Good idea. (I haven't been sending out many emails to anybody of late, but finding an area of agreement with Yoshie demanded a response.)
Another (perhaps not as good) idea: maybe we ought to think a bit about uncritical knowledge fetishism. As I think Kantos suggests, it seems like we should be able to teach people to (e.g.) read at a high school level and do algebra without warehousing them for 13 years. And what possible reason is there to ship so many people off to college for another several years to learn (or weakly attempt to learn or even in some cases weakly feign to attempt to learn) about matters they're bound to find uninteresting and useless?
-- Luke