Maybe just getting a job will (on average) actually result in learning more valuable things, but frankly I don’t see any reason to believe that. (More things valuable for becoming a cog in someone else’s industrial machine, maybe, though even that isn’t obvious.)
Ok, well I certainly wouldn’t argue that a generic alternative exists, I mean, that’s my original point, that they are wasteful via the fact that they steal signal-strength from any alternative that would crop up.
In my personal experience, getting a job on average is better for learning, if you look for jobs that can provide de-facto mentors/teachers, but that might be because so few young people get a job. Or maybe me and the people I know that took my advice and quite university are just very good at learning from other practitionares rather than professors.
Maybe we need different ways of optimizing 18-20-year-olds’ lives for learning new and valuable things. I’d be interested to see concrete proposals. An obvious question I hope they’d address: why expect that in practice this will end up better than universities?
Well, my proposal in the article is basically that we had such a system, it was called a university, but it got slowly eroded as it went the way of a safety/community provision institution (or at least provisioning an illusion of those two).
My argument for why it worked better in the past are point 1-2 and arguably 3 and 4.
I can well believe that universities used to work well and worsened over time. The point of my question at the end there is that I would expect any New Improved University Replacement to suffer the same process.
(Of course it might be worth it anyway, if it works better for long enough.)
Ok, well I certainly wouldn’t argue that a generic alternative exists, I mean, that’s my original point, that they are wasteful via the fact that they steal signal-strength from any alternative that would crop up.
In my personal experience, getting a job on average is better for learning, if you look for jobs that can provide de-facto mentors/teachers, but that might be because so few young people get a job. Or maybe me and the people I know that took my advice and quite university are just very good at learning from other practitionares rather than professors.
Well, my proposal in the article is basically that we had such a system, it was called a university, but it got slowly eroded as it went the way of a safety/community provision institution (or at least provisioning an illusion of those two).
My argument for why it worked better in the past are point 1-2 and arguably 3 and 4.
I can well believe that universities used to work well and worsened over time. The point of my question at the end there is that I would expect any New Improved University Replacement to suffer the same process.
(Of course it might be worth it anyway, if it works better for long enough.)
That seems reasonable, I’d assume the same.
As in, if I could think of an implementable solution I’d have tried implementing it.
My point here as to describe the problem from a certain angle, which is easy, I lay no claim on the harder task of prescribing a solution.