3.159 education and universities, cont. (35)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Thu, 22 Jun 89 21:27:51 EDT


Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 159. Thursday, 22 Jun 1989.

Date: Tue, 20 Jun 89 23:12 EST
From: <WADE@CRNLGSM>
Subject: education & universities

So, let me play devil's advocate for a minute. What exactly is
it that would be lost if we were to, oh, say, close all the universities?
(besides your jobs, of course, but, hey, I didn't see YOU out protesting
when 500,000 blue-collar workers were laid off last year, so why should
they give a hoot about you?)
With life-long learning, on-job-training, "business" spending more
dollars on education and training within house than the country spends
on higher-education (since, from its view, Higher education doesn't
seem to be working), and research for dollars certainly as do-able in a
research plant as a "university" -- what's the point? Why keep them
around at all eating up dollars that could be spent on social problems
that all these university trained PhD's seem to have gotten us into and/or
be unable to solve for us anyway?
If the university cannot (a) instill values that matter and (b)
demonstrate that they matter, then what exactly IS their reason for
existence any longer? At some point, some catastrophe event will occur
and "people", faced with ever INcreasing social problems on the one hand,
and "scientists" on the other who want billions for subnuclear or exo-
galactic studies, will simply say "enough -- I don't understand what you're
working on, but I'm pretty sure it's not MY problems so why the *&()*& am
I paying for it?"
[ there, that should stir the waters ]