Besides posting my blog entries here on my very own blog, I also post them on Daily KOS, a progressive political blog site. What is great about Daily KOS is that I get a great deal of responses to my posts which is always great when you are writing and also exposes me to other wisdom that expands my own thinking.

I got over 200 comments to my Daily KOS post yesterday on “College… The New High School” (though many were responses to other responses and not to my original post.) If you want to see my “diary” on Daily KOS, including all the responses I get, click here.

Here are bits from some of the many great heartfelt and provocative comments. I am taking the liberty to excerpt several of them (hopefully not too badly out of context) and comment further to try and keep this discussion stoked.

Mister Gloom said…

If you do have the skills to start your own business you really don’t need a degree (my friend, a self-employed computer consultant earns 80k a year, and he’ll never finish the bachelor’s degree he’s been dicking around with for at least 8 years).

I’m wondering if a four-year college education, which usually has several years of planning leading up to it, is too awkward and time-consuming an educational vehicle for our current quickly changing and dynamic world. Nowadays you seem to need to be ready to jump when the iron is hot.

Blindyone said…

Education makes the quietest moments interesting. I don’t think that you have to have media, or other distractions going on, if you learned something interesting from some teacher along the way that helps you look at a plant or a flower or a rock formation or a building or stranger on the subway in a different way.

With due respect to Blindyone’s heartfelt comment, do we really need high-priced formal education in the context of a four-year academic program to give us insight on the little things of life? Reading Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine” did more of that for me than any college class.

Dreamcatcher said…

Anyone who views college as job training…..is in college for the wrong reason. That is not its purpose and never has been. Education is about advancing the knowledge base of the species.

My take is that college is seen as a rite of passage you go through to make you a “player” in society. My understanding is that college emerged in the Modern Era initially to teach people to be lawyers, doctors, clerics or military officers. Those were the basic “professions”. College has played a role for the aristocratic to train their youth in all the aspects of aristocratic culture. But certainly millions of people look at it now as where you go to learn a profession. That is certainly how I looked at it when I returned to school to get my degree in computer science. I was lazar focused on getting the skills and the credential to enter that profession.

Danjuma said…

That’s what the liberal arts is, not “art for liberals” but the skills necessary for free citizens in a free republic.

I really think we have gone terribly wrong not to let our kids learn and practice citizen skills in K-12 school by playing a significant role in actually running the classroom and running the school by employing the democratic process. The few kids I read about who get to attend the current rare “democratic schools” learn a completely different activist, participatory approach to society than the rest of us that mostly “consumed” prefabricated education.

ManhattanMan said…

Education is never a waste. I wish our education system ran cheaper and faster and better, but even with all it’s flaws it is better than nothing.

I think there is a misnomer hear that the alternative to formal education is nothing. Borrowing from economic theory, there are “opportunity costs” (the value gained for things not done) to everything we invest our money and time on. There is so much learning in everyday life if you get out and live it.

Upstate NY said…

The reason to go to college before finding “your compass” as you put it, is to be exposed to methodical ways of learning and critical thinking which are actually unavailable to you in the general culture. The internet can’t do it, at least not yet, and my own personal experience tells me that I needed to be inducted into the kind of reasoning and research I now treasure.

I think kids could easily be exposed to methodical ways of learning much earlier than college, but that said, I think we undervalue how important it is for individuals to construct their own knowledge and build their own methodologies rather than be instructed on other people’s methodologies. As to research, my partner Sally has done way more comprehensive research on energetic healing on the Internet than anything she or I ever did in college.

Wisper said…

Daily regimented education provides a safe structured lifestyle cocoon, oftentimes paid for by someone else (parent, the school, taxpayers, etc) that is too comforting to contemplate ever leaving.

There is an opportunity cost to submitting to “regimented education”. Maybe drugs is a good metaphor. There are times when it is appropriate, particularly when you need to address a serious problem, but most of the time it is best to be out of that “cocoon”.

Dretutz said…

College education is one of the only shots we have at preserving democracy. High Schools curriculum is more propaganda than an exploration of ideas–and that includes the so-called Advanced placement courses which prepare for a test. It takes four years post high school for many of us to learn how to think clearly, write clearly and take command of our information processing which guides day to day decision.

I would substitute “programming” for “propaganda” above, but I take the point. College has been an enriched environment where older youth and young adults can come together, participate in various groups and discuss and act on political ideas. But there is no reason that could not be done in K-12 as well, and democratic schools do that today, or other informal youth associations and camps etc. My kids got their democracy experience going to Unitarian-Universalist youth camps.

DetriusXii said…

If university is supposed to be some ideal goal to reach for, it can be achieved later in life. People don’t need to amass themselves in debt when their income source is unsure all in the justification of valuable life experience.

This is my concern that families save for years to get their kid into college and/or the family or student borrows heavily to do so. With college now becoming so expensive, I hate to see students and their families shoot their wad on a four-year academic program that their youth in many cases is not ready for right out of high school. The great expense these days of higher education is making the “mulligan” (like I did) harder and harder for many.

Ivan Illich said…

The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.

Illich was a big unschooler (that’s kind of my bias too, if you haven’t figured that out already) but it strikes me that his “educational funnels” is this whole idea of the bias our society has for learning in formal, high-powered and credential-oriented settings.

Coquiero said…

I’m a big fan of letting a kid who’s not thrilled about college to get a job, support themselves for awhile, see what life is like out there in the real world, THEN letting them decide what they want to do. Look at the diarists assertion that he and his partner both held positions after 4 years of college that they could have held after high school. What if they’d done them 4 years earlier, then could have perhaps chosen what to study at University more wisely?

It is hard to look back and ponder “what if?” Though I have a soft spot and great loyalty to my alma mater, the University of Michigan, I think I might have been better served if I had continued my avocation in theater combined with the kind of political/community activism I got into out in Los Angeles. I think it might have been much richer learning.

MGross said…

Honestly, there’s few things as useful as deciding early in your life what you want to do. I’d narrowed it down to two fields by college, and made the decision before I enrolled. You really need to decide what you want to do (and not necessarily the major, I mean, your end job) before you go into college.

For some kids, it is clear from their youth where their developmental path is headed, particularly when they exhibit in early youth great talent for something. But in our complicated society, where most of the educational institutions we find ourselves spending so much time in mandate most of what we learn, how we learn, and when we learn it, it is hard immersed in that pre-programmed environment to see a path for oneself.

hegemony57…

I would that becoming an informed citizen and having an informed (and critically thinking) citizenry are at least as important as getting the skills you need to work at 18 or 22 or 25. In fact I would say that one is a prerequisite for the other. There’s plenty we can do to change/reform our education system but we certainly don’t need less learning.

I think that there is another misnomer in our culture that people have to be prodded and incentivized to learn. We are learning machines naturally, and if many of our schools weren’t forcing kids to do something they do naturally, and making it boring and tedious, I think we would have a flowering of learning like no one has ever seen.

LordMike said…

I was where you were when I graduated undergrad with a nice liberal arts degree and no one willing to hire me for anything but delivering pizzas. I cursed school, too… but, I persevered… got a practical masters, and found that my undergraduate training in skills no one cared about (writing, reading, presenting, research), allowed me to zoom past my peers who had only practical skills, but none of the “rounding” to maximize them.

“Zoom past” in terms of better jobs or leading a more fulfilling life? I get uncomfortable with some implied contest underlying here.

Draghnfly said…

Can we reasonably expect high school graduates to choose the path of their life arc on the first try? No. We need flexibility within our society. Not every job needs college. Not every person is right for college. And, above all, not every time is the right time for college.

I strongly agree… flexibility. My way of saying this is we need to acknowledge, in education, religion, and all the institutions that address human development, we need to think in terms of “many paths” rather than “one size fits all”.

Evilgalblues said…

Not going to college immediately out of HS I think is the right answer for many. I really regret that I wasted all the money I had saved up for my first degree. I never even really used it. By the time I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up there was no way for me to do it. IMHO, if my family, teachers, counselors had let me take the year or two off that I wanted and I had gotten into the “real world” it would have made a huge difference for me.

Anecdotally I am seeing this a lot. I think it was certainly true for me.

Magurakurin said…

I remember a day in the 11th grade a teacher told my class that this was the most important year of our lives(the year being 1979) because we would be choosing our college and career paths. I remember very clearly my thoughts that day. I realized that at 15 I wasn’t old enought to know for sure if this guy was telling me the truth or not. I somehow figured he was full of shit and that this probably wouldn’t end up being the defining moments of my entire life. But I also felt that if this guy was right, and we, a group of hapless 15 and 16 year olds, were about to make the most critical decisions of our lives, then the whole system was so hopeless fucked and perverted that I wasn’t much interested in it one way or another.

I read this and I feel anger, maybe its not fair, but shame on our culture for not creating some sort of institution or venue where 15 and 16 year olds can discuss freely these big questions and not wallow in haplessness and flung forward on a pre-programmed one-size-fits-all path.

It is a very interesting and important discussion I think, and I would like to keep it up.