Lately, I have had a couple of lefty authors ask me to write an article on the workplace and college degrees. The hope seems to be that, as someone in the workforce, I will help explain why it's very very important to have a college degree - on accounta the skills that you learn that will prepare you for work. The hope also seems to be that I will fight off the horrid horrid yoots who, these days, run around trashing schooling as nothing but a machine for the production of workers and reproduction of class antagonisms.
I have to say that, from where I sit, recent college grads don't have much by way of skills that will prepare them for jobs in doing marketing writing, technical writing, software engineering, quality analysis, etc. - even if they are in programs that purport to prepare them. At a recent conference, not one in a room of a bout a hundred 20 somethings were willing to say that their degree programs prepared them for jobs - whether it was as a writer, editor, engineer, marketer. Rather, the ones who spoke said that getting a job in the "real" world felt like being dumped on Mars. They had no idea what was going on. Seemed that everything they'd ever studied felt completely divorced from the "real" world.
I've been working with someone who has some ideas about this problem. He wants to change the curriculum to prepare people for what it's like to work on software projects. Yadda. But I have to say that the last thing the left should worry about is whether a liberal arts education should prepare people for jobs. It wasn't ever supposed to prepare people for jobs. And the desire to wholesale abandon a liberal arts education in favor of an increasingly vocational education to prepare the Benjamins of the world to go in to "plastics" is fucking absurd. This seems to be what the pwogs and liberals want. Then there is a faction who seem to want to prove that, yes, yes, thank god almighty, a course on Derridean deconstruction will be completely useful to the workforce.
BTW, it's shag. I dumped the old domain on accounta never using it anymore except for mail. Decided to sub under one of my old testing accounts/spam dump accounts.
On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> " Who's the author lately who's made the argument that corporations
> purposefully pursued policies to keep us working 40+ hr weeks? Reason
> being: they were afraid of what would happen if we had more free time on
> our hands."
>
> I hope someone can answer this.
>
> I think it undoubtedly true that more free time is dangerous for
> capitalism.
> More than this raises the question of whether the ruling elites believe
> their own ideology? Richard Ohlmmann in apost last month on the Radical
> Caucus List observed that he always believed and taught that the
> capitalists
> _did_ believe their own ideology but that he was beginning to wonder. I
> forget his exact words, but roughly he suggested that capitalists now take
> the attitude that the future can take care of itself; a version of After Me
> the Deluge.
>
> Carrol
>
>
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