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America's Outmoded "Factory Model" Educational System Needs to be Radically ReinventedMONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2017
oftwomonds.com
Charles Hugh Smith
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2017/02/americas-outmoded-factory-model.htmlIt's obvious that we desperately need a new decentralized, individualized and far more productive system of education.I have long held that America's educational system is an outmoded "factory model" designed to produce interchangeable industrial and service workers en masse for an industrial economy of factories and a 1960s-era service sector that needed millions of employees with basic-skills: Is Our Education System Based on a Factory Metaphor? (November 15, 2005)
There are two fatal flaws in this idealistic thinking:
1. Funneling every child into a horrendously costly four-year university has stripped our economy of all the skills that aren't taught in college: welding, pipefitting, etc.
Reskilling America argues that we have purposefully let our practical-skills education decline in favor of the highly impractical goal of issuing millions of diplomas in gender studies, environmental studies, etc., four-year degrees that qualify the graduate to work in coffee shops or as Uber drivers.
Even STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) degrees appear to be mismatched with the real-world job market in terms of what employers want students to know and the number of jobs in STEM that are actually being generated.
Evidence suggests that the number of tech/STEM jobs has remained constant for years, undermining the assumption that graduating 1 million STEM grads magically creates 1 million new STEM jobs in the real world.
2. Most students gain little of value from their four years of squandering $100,000+.
Graduates exit college with a diploma but few if any practical skills, few if any practical knowledge bases and few if any of the eight essential skills I describe in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.
Consider the study Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses which concluded that "American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students."
These charts illustrate the costs and diminishing returns: