[ExI] brave new world in education

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2017 at 10:30 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>
> >...It will indeed be a Brave New World...BillK
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Apologies I lost track of the subject line in the thread from a few days
> ago
> regarding the future of education, which is a topic I have been pondering
> recently.
>
> I think it was Adrian who commented about a company having the choice of
> hiring a college grad with a degree in CS or someone without a college
> degree but with a certificate of some sort in the language or software that
> company needs.  In only one case does that company know the applicant can
> do
> the job.  I would pick the certified applicant over the degreed one.
>
> Also in the past week we have discussed the value of a liberal arts
> education.  I do recognize that debate rages, but at the same time I will
> make the claim that a liberal arts education is of little value to a
> company
> in a desperate race to compete in low cost access to space or programming
> the latest robot toy.  They don't need that degree and do not want to pay
> for it.
>
> Pondering the future of education, the biggest change coming is likely a
> rapid expansion in the options for certifying specific skills, analogous to
> taking state boards exams for a professional engineer's license.  Is not
> that the biggest coming revolution in education?
>
> spike
>

​What's good for the company may not be good for the workers.  No liberal
education means that they are limited to their technical skills - of course
that's all the company wants.

How can one have a decent conversation with a person who has little
knowledge of history, biology, psychology, civics and a lot more?  You
could say, well, they can learn those things in their spare time, and you
are right.  Many will.  But many won't, and many won't have the background
that a professor can give to understand what they are reading.  Do you
really want a population so limited in understanding the modern world?

I also suppose that the skills you are talking about are those that will be
taught to AIs eventually, putting the techs out of work.  If you believe,
as St. John's surely does, that a liberal education can teach one how to
think, then without a liberal education a tech put out of work by an AI is
no more use to society than a 1950s lawnmower (which I remember with utter
disdain and hatred).

bill w

bill w

>
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