Where education went wrong.

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

I think we need to distinguish between intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. There are plenty of the latter talking bullshit.

And a lot of skilled workers who don't get .

 

[frigidweirdo]

As a retired steelworker I have little respect for college-educated intellectuals. These types accumulate letters after their names and though they occupy positions of influence, as time goes by they are no more able to make sense of the world than the plebian population. If an olympic runner can break records in youth that is good thing but later in life that runner canot break records because the talent has wained due to time and age. But academic intellectuals that suffer from the same reality are not held to the same standards as the rest of the population and so, do a lot of damage to society. As the age they get dumber and that is reality.

Here are two authors that influenced me in life:

Key insights from: The True Believer

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) was a longshoreman for decades, loading and unloading cargo from ships. He was also a farmer, a railway man, and a lay scholar. After being temporarily blinded from ages 7 to 15, he read voraciously for fear that the blindness might return. Hoffer was also a prolific...

thinkr.org

http://www.capitolreader.com/bonus/Intellectuals%20and%20Society.pdf

I tried to explain to someone, once, when I was working in a restaurant, that they benefit from people having a higher education. Higher educated people often earn more, do jobs that bring in more money, which raises the wages for the lower educated people.

A dumb bumble **** from Mississippi earns way more money than a dumb bumble **** in Gansu, China. Why? Because the US has a lot of educated people doing things that make all people richer.

 

[DGS49]

The term, "intellectual" has taken on a negative connotation in recent times. In fact, our sitting VP has mildly fought back at the accusation that he is one. There is a common aphorism among the working class, "This idea is so stupid that only an intellectual could take it seriously," with "Boys can be girls," being the latest prominent example of the phenomenon.

Making the discussion political - why not? - the highly educated people on the Left tend to be experts in fluffy subjects such as art history or gender studies while the highly educated on the Right are architects, engineers, and CPA's. Lawyers, of course, are a whole different ballgame, spread evenly across the whole political spectrum.

I suspect that the OP/retired steelworker has seen highly educated people throughout his life, people who have to call a plumber to "fix" a clogged toilet, or have no idea how to go about changing a flat tire. What good is an expensive college education when you cannot do the most basic things in your own life?

I think we all (at least chose of us with male gonads) admire the Renaissance Man who is educated and an NRA member with a garage full of tools, with which he can fix anything that doesn't involve electronics.

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

The term, "intellectual" has taken on a negative connotation in recent times. In fact, our sitting VP has mildly fought back at the accusation that he is one. There is a common aphorism among the working class, "This idea is so stupid that only an intellectual could take it seriously," with "Boys can be girls," being the latest prominent example of the phenomenon.

Making the discussion political - why not? - the highly educated people on the Left tend to be experts in fluffy subjects such as art history or gender studies while the highly educated on the Right are architects, engineers, and CPA's. Lawyers, of course, are a whole different ballgame, spread evenly across the whole political spectrum.

I suspect that the OP/retired steelworker has seen highly educated people throughout his life, people who have to call a plumber to "fix" a clogged toilet, or have no idea how to go about changing a flat tire. What good is an expensive college education when you cannot do the most basic things in your own life?

I think we all (at least chose of us with male gonads) admire the Renaissance Man who is educated and an NRA member with a garage full of tools, with which he can fix anything that doesn't involve electronics.

America, unfortunately, has a long and strong and wrong history of anti-intellectualism.

 

[Woodznutz]

Double Entry Accounting is SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS old.

Education went wrong by not making it mandatory in high school since 1950.

It is totally absurd that economists have not been talking about planned obsolescence since Sputnik.

What is the NET Domestic Product?

What has happened to the depreciation of all of the Automobiles purchased by American consumers since 1950? John Maynard Keynes never saw a television commercial for an automobile. ChatGPT says 650+ million cars have been made in the US since 1950.

So here we are half-a-century after the Moon landing and PhD economists cannot even talk about hundreds of billions of dollars of Depreciation.

But look what happened to the price of the Ford Model-T from 1908 to 1925. How much could Americans have saved by not getting excited about useless variations?
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Great point. I have driven the same basic model for 27 years. Three Mercury Grand Marquis, years 1996, 2005, and currently a 2003 LS. It's 'my car' and will be as long as I can get one. New cars with all the bells and whistles are of no interest to me.