Mikivoja
59 posts, incept 2021-09-20
2022-04-30 08:23:31
There are really only two components to education: training and testing. Training should only be restricted to things you can't teach yourself, where you need access to expensive infrastructure or hands-on experience. The most of things that are currently taught at the colleges can be learned from books and tutorials which only leads to the second part of education and that is testing. In my opinion colleges should only be about figuring out how to prove your knowledge and skill and teaching you only things where you can't do it on your own. This cuts the cost of education substantially and gets rid of debt problem for those who are motivated to learn on their own and only want a way to prove their knowledge and skill.
For example, take a degree in history, literature, economics, etc. - all these things require no hands-on training, they only require a lot of reading and feedback. Reading you can do on your own, and feedback is all the rejection you are going to suffer unless come up with something actually useful rather than just bunch of useless theories that don't amount to anything.
For the exact sciences it is much easier to construct testing and it is much easier to learn on your own, because feedback is just about getting the answers right, which you can look up. The true value in engineering and sciences comes from job experience, not education anyways.
As for medicine, crafts, and things of that nature, you need hands-on experience and expensive infrastructure in order to learn, so education makes sense but only for part of it, because education there even today is mostly theoretical.
Colleges are just dinosaurs from the time when access to books and libraries was an expensive privilege and they would like to keep it that way through an expensive subscription model for both books and articles, where people who extract the value are not the ones that contribute much to its creation.