[lbo-talk] the view from capital

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Sun Sep 10 20:07:50 PDT 2006


At around 10/9/06 10:37 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Sep 10, 2006, at 9:19 PM, joanna wrote:
>
>>> The more people who fail to complete college, the more people who
>>> will blame themselves for their failure to find decent paying jobs.
>>
>> Maybe. Or maybe, it will occur to some that there should be no
>> required link between a living wage and a college degree. Maybe it
>> will occur to them that college is just a huge justification for
>> inequality.
>
> Joanna, you have a PhD, right? Do you regret having one? Do you think
> all those years of education made you better-equipped to cope with the
> world and make a living? Isn't education a lot more than a "huge
> justification for inequality"? Why take such a hostile, reductionist
> attitude?
>

If I may, the point I think is that in the majority (or at least a large, significant # of) case(s), neither does education prepare you for jobs nor do jobs require the educational qualification that is demanded.

Ergo, requirements for these qualification (access to which is correlated to class) are artificial limits. Perhaps a good example is the field of computer programming, where the work of an undergrad student is doing quite well against a multi-billion dollar "best of the world" team's software suite. This is not an exceptional case. In every corner of the field you will find unqualified contributors. Half my co-workers are trained in entirely unrelated fields (ranging from psychology to history). None of the years I spent learning Math and Computer Science has made me better-equipped to cope with the world. Hell, if I had learnt some Jujitsu or something instead, I could at least challenge Mike Larkin and Anarchuck to an ass-whupping!

Also, even if college is required for a particular job, why a link between wage and education? Whatever happened to 'each according to his ability, ...'?

(I can't believe I am getting involved in one more thread!!! ;-))

--ravi

-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/ If you have nothing better to do: http://platosbeard.org/



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