Our Crazy-Making, Profiteering Education-Career Maze

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The answer is not another $1 trillion in student loan debt to pay for another raft of declining-value credentials.

So let"s say we want to set up a system to help students choose a career that fits their aptitudes and interests. What would we do? How about:

1. Give them zero (or superficial) aptitude and career-related tests.

2. Provide a few minutes with a counselor who knows nothing about them, their aptitudes or potential career-related interests.

3. Design the high school education system to provide near-zero knowledge of finance, debt, economics, how the economy functions and what the world of work demands of workers.

4. Denigrate (subtly or directly) non-college career options, channeling those who aren"t sure into 4-year colleges, higher education paid with student loans designed to maximize profiteering.

5. Force them to choose a major or field of study at 17 or 18 years of age, despite their lack of real-world experience and objective knowledge of how the economy functions and their own aptitudes/character traits.

6. Disconnect this higher education from real-world work places so they exit higher education with little actual knowledge of the skills employers need.

7. When the student graduates after borrowing a fortune and discovers their diploma has low value in the marketplace or is in a field they"ve found they loathe, then suggest the "solution" is to borrow another fortune and invest more years in obtaining another credential.

This is the American education-career maze--ineffective, self-defeating, wasteful, irrational, and apparently designed to maximize student confusion, poor choices and profiteering by higher education and the student-loan racketeers.

As if this wasn"t bad enough, what do we decide to teach our students if careers might be significantly different in 10 or 20 years? Yes, math, the basics of science and communication skills will remain useful as a foundation, but these basics aren"t enough to prepare students for a fast-changing emerging economy/4th Industrial Revolution.

Clearly, it would be enormously beneficial to teach the skills needed to learn on one"s own and adapt successfully to changing circumstances. The current system is a hierarchy of credentialing that enriches those dispensing and funding the credentialing.

Our system"s response to those left behind, those with inadequate skills and those who chose unwisely is always: get another credential, at enormous expense. Nobody tells students that credentials are in over-supply and are therefore losing their value.

Value and profits flow to what"s scarce and in demand. Trying to reach the top of the credential pyramid is a crowded race, and the losers are left with debt and wasted years they could have spent actually learning useful knowledge bases and skills--in effect, pursuing a self-directed path of accrediting yourself.

The education-career maze doesn"t have to be so self-defeating, costly, convoluted or ineffective. My book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy lays out a model of higher education based on workplace apprenticeships in all fields, from carpentry to chemistry to sociology, from Day One, a structure that dramatically lowers costs while providing an education based on real-world acquisition and use of knowledge and skills in the workplace, not sitting in a chair watching a lecture.

Technology is a core part of improving results while lowering costs by 90%. Consider this article: Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers.

I describe the process of accrediting yourself in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, which also details the eight essential skills needed to navigate the emerging economy.

What"s the emerging economy/4th Industrial Revolution? It"s not so much the replacement of human labor by robots as the augmentation of human skills with technology, and the focus on a simple but profound source of value creation: what"s scarce and in high demand? What"s abundant and not in demand?

The point of my book is to lay out a pathway of learning how to learn on our own and acquiring the soft skills needed to collaborate, communicate and manage teams/projects effectively, regardless of the field of endeavor.

How can we expect young students with little life experience to choose wisely when they don"t even understand how the economy works? The current education-career maze assumes that some basic math and science knowledge is all students need to figure out their role in a fast-changing economy that they don"t even understand.

The inadequacy of our crazy-making education-career maze boggles the mind. We need to do much, much better, not just for our students but for our society. The answer is not another $1 trillion in student loan debt to pay for another raft of declining-value credentials. We need a new system, and fast. Solutions abound, but not within the current crazy-making education-career maze.

Here"s a snapshot of the workforce"s education level:

Even the most credentialed workers" earnings have stagnated:

And here"s your wunnerful federal government, enforcing debt-serfdom on college students to maximize the profits of the student-loan racket:

If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Check out both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print, $5.95 audiobook) For more, please visit the OTM essentials website.

Why Is The State In Our Bedrooms & Living Rooms As Well As Our Bank Accounts?

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

There"s a word to describe a state with unlimited power over the private lives, spaces, choices, behaviors, communications and accounts of its citizens: totalitarian.

A limited government is concerned with proscribing the exploitation of citizens by elites and criminals. A Totalitarian State seeks control of everything--including what goes on in the bedrooms, living rooms and minds of its citizens.

A recent conversation with my longtime friend G.F.B. clarified a key distinction between the public and private spheres.

G.F.B."s example of the state exerting control over its citizens" private choices and behaviors in their own homes was the Prohibition of alcohol which was the federal law of the land in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933.

Though alcohol consumption in the home was not banned outright at the federal level, the net result of banning the manufacture and distribution of alcohol was the criminalization of everyday citizens" attempts to purchase alcohol for their home consumption.

A limited government"s purview is actions taken in public that could harm other citizens. Drunken drivers, for example, end up killing innocent citizens. Limiting the "freedom" to drive drunk is a state action that is limited to the public sphere: if a citizen chooses to get drunk in the privacy of his own home, that"s different from driving on public streets while drunk.

In the good old days of the early Republic, the government was focused on matters of sovereignty and defense, not what citizens were doing in their own homes or communicating in private letters. Enforcement of federal laws was largely limited to collecting tariffs and other revenues and adjudicating property disputes.

Central states have long had an interest in control and adjudicating property disputes.ling every aspect of their citizens" private lives, beliefs and choices. What separated these total-control autocracies and totalitarian states from governments "of the people, by the people, for the people" was the sacrosanct civil liberties that protected the privacy and private choices of the citizens from state control.

The unholy alliance of "progressive" do-gooders and let-me-tell-you-how-to-live religious zealots delivered Prohibition, and a host of other "we want control of your bedroom and living room" regulations. This moral superiority was of course the height of hubris and hypocrisy, as the zealots and "progressives" were just as sinful, petty and venal as any "unenlightened" non-believer.

The separation of church and state was dissolved by the moral crusades in which the "morally superior" wielded the brute power of the state to punish anyone who didn"t live according to the demands of the "morally superior."

Look, if a private citizen wants to shoot up smack in the privacy of his own home, and perhaps end his life in an overdose, that should be his right. Who authorized the state to intercede in private choices and behaviors?

The state may limit the "freedom" to inject others with smack, or promote the injection of smack publicly, but it has no right to impose its view of "rightness" on the choices made in the bedrooms and living rooms of private citizens.

The Prohibition of drugs has been an unmitigated catastrophe for those ensnared in the War on Drugs gulag and for the nation. The state has the option of educating the citizenry about the potential dangers of drugs, including alcohol and cigarettes, and limiting the sale of these drugs to minors, but its prohibitions should be limited to the public sphere.

Yesterday, I described how the state can steal money from your bank account before informing you that the state suspects you may owe taxes, but with no actual evidence to support this suspicion. First they steal your money, and the bank deducts an additional $100 for the hard work of digitally transferring your money to the state, then they notify you of their suspicions.

If this isn"t Kafkaesque, then what is?

A limited government would be required to go through public, judicial processes to gain the authority to take money from your account. But the state doesn"t need any judicial process or review; a nameless bureaucrat (and his/her computer program) simply enters your name and bank account in a "suspicious" list and the machinery of the state steals your money and then informs you after the fact of your presumed guilt.

There"s a word to describe a state with unlimited power over the private lives, spaces, choices, behaviors, communications and accounts of its citizens: totalitarian.

Smith"s Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.