What's the point of post-secondary general education?

[William Tell Underpass]

Can confirm. You can have more practical experience than postdocs and get trapped as a lab monkey forever just because you lack the three magic letters. And I had no inclination to pursue my doctorate because seven years making less than minimum wage was not an attractive prospect.

This is the indoctrination about STEM they don't tell you about.

To be honest Humanities and social sciences afford you more opportunities by developing soft skills (obviously not with the retard subjects) and basically prepping you to work in office environments, writing reports/essays, working in teams, collaboration, presentations, and most important, persausive writing and dialogue. These are skills you need to not look like a total monkey in the white collar world.

STEM students are aggressively pushed into the Academic rat race and the ones who dont make it past the masters or phd level wind up working in peripheral industries the way lawyers do where only like 20% ever practice law (for them its usually govt work, realestate, corporate support, middle management) are either trapped there without having the skills to move up or change industries.

 

[Stoneheart]

STEM students are aggressively pushed into the Academic rat race and the ones who dont make it past the masters or phd level wind up working in peripheral industries the way lawyers do where only like 20% ever practice law (for them its usually govt work, realestate, corporate support, middle management) are either trapped there without having the skills to move up or change industries.

thats because your STEM education is shit... we have to fly out people to fix shit in the US factories all the time.
I had to fly to the colonies for a 2 day seminar where i had to teach monkey how to not burn down a factory some years ago.
Its was a shit show, half the people couldnt be asked to read the instruction before the course, they knew nothing about the chemicals they were working with.

To be honest Humanities and social sciences afford you more opportunities by developing soft skills (obviously not with the retard subjects) and basically prepping you to work in office environments, writing reports/essays, working in teams, collaboration, presentations, and most important, persausive writing and dialogue. These are skills you need to not look like a total monkey in the white collar world.

but you arent realy usefull and alot of people dislike beeing leeches.

 

[William Tell Underpass]

but you arent realy usefull and alot of people dislike beeing leeches.

Factory workers are low IQ niggers, the office workers are leeches, whatever your job is are the saviours of the west.

Management & admin is a natural byproduct of people demanding standards and reliability and so long as businesses keep demanding a piece of toilet paper with 'bach' written on it, you may as well be teaching them a few skills they will actually use for the majority of non-menial / non-physical labour.

You are somehow simultaneously being a Karen demanding to see the manager, and also saying that managers shouldn't exist because they don't value add.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652

Here ou go.

 

[Chad Nasty]

I think its just something people said "this is what options in life you have" and I found it to be a total grift. I didn't like school, I didn't like the military. I've started my own project and its incredible the rate and ability which I can learn when I like it. Like people are like "must have a 4 year degree", and I've met so many retards in with advanced degrees. Same with the military, I've dogshit NCO's.

I learned a lesson: I've had a good teacher teach me complex things well, and a bad teacher who couldn't teach me to wipe my ass. I've had leaders that made me inspired and others I would shit stomp onsite, no hesitation if I ever saw them in public.

I learned I'm not conventional and don't like or do well with the conventional paths. I think you're able to learn anything if you have the enthusiasm and right explanation. Unfortunately, its a one size fits all indoctrination pipeline to two places. And some people just aren't on that wavelength.

STEM students are aggressively pushed into the Academic rat race and the ones who dont make it past the masters or phd level wind up working in peripheral industries the way lawyers do where only like 20% ever practice law (for them its usually govt work, realestate, corporate support, middle management) are either trapped there without having the skills to move up or change industries.

I just didn't like being a stem student. Most of the time, your engineering job sucks. STEM is so up its ass about degrees and where you got them, not really if you've done anything cool. I've learned more in doing my current project than I ever did in school. But thats my experience.

 

[Queen Elizabeth II]

I'm a burger and that doesn't even make sense to me. We in the states basically consider [X] level math to be prerequisite to a course. You can take pre-calc in high school and be in calc in your first semester in college. And calc 1 would be prerequisite for most engineering classes. Once you have taken (and passed) whatever level of math is requisite for the class, you can take that class. Am I just misinterpreting what you're saying here?

Sorry its took me a while to see this.

That system makes sense, I didn't realise it worked like that but it's not how most European institutions work.

Individual countries may use different labels for them but all 16+ Education is roughly graded from 0/Entry (really basic middle school level, most people don't have any qualifications at this level) to 8 (Doctorate/Post doctorate). The highest level qualification most people hold tends to be level 2 (end of Secondary education in the UK, Spain etc) or three (end of secondary education in Ireland, France; sixth form education in the UK etc).

Entry is governed more by age as a minor (Virtually no European states allow children to be held back or moved forward a grade) and then as an adult number of years of study. You need one/two years of a level 2 course to study a level three. You need two years of level three to enter onto a three year degree program (starts at 4 and the final year is usually 6), three years of undergrad to enter a level seven...So on.

You can be as smart as you want, but skipping classes or grades ahead of your age never happens in the mainstream track. There are ways around it, when I was a student; there was a home schooled genius 12 year old who had got onto an undergrad degree (not in my discipline) and that was because they had got him several qualifications from outside the EU they were willing to consider valid. Not because of their level, but because of how long he has spent on them.

That really is the once in a lifetime exception though.

So what it really means is that if an American has less than three years of mathematical specialist study at university level; (There is little to no allowance for generalist or courses outside of your declared degree intention) no matter how advanced those courses were most European states will not consider him to be qualified at that level. He'd probably be considered to have a "Foundation" (Half) of a degree at level 4 which isnt enough to apply for college grad jobs.

 

[Watermelanin]

Entry is governed more by age as a minor (Virtually no European states allow children to be held back or moved forward a grade) and then as an adult number of years of study.

So here it's not (necessarily) about competence either. Just that you pass the course.
I can't really say anything about other school districts. But mine, starting around 4th grade, you are put in the "normal" math group, a "faster" one, or a "slower" one (not that they'd call it that) up until you reach 9th grade. Going into 9th grade, you would be in pre-algebra, algebra, or geometry. Starting at geometry, you could (in principle) finish that course in one half of the school year and move on to algebra 2 the next. The next year you'd be in trig for half a semester and then go on to finish pre-calc in the latter half. Scheduling conflicts and other graduation requirements throw a wrench in this machine, but it is possible to finish pre-calc at the end of your sophomore year in high school (my schools didn't offer anything beyond that, but you could take stats and the like for elective credits).
So yeah: you have a good bit of freedom starting at 9th grade in America. You can use that freedom however you like so long as you also complete the required courses to graduate.

 

[Baseton Repillé]

In America, it's entirely possible to be functionally illiterate and still graduate high school (defining literacy as "skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences"). The purpose of tertiary general education is mostly just to prove to employers that you are not a complete fucking retard. In a better world, a high school diploma would signify this, but we gotta get them graduation rates up and also colleges need paypigs.

 

[Queen Elizabeth II]

So here it's not (necessarily) about competence either. Just that you pass the course.
I can't really say anything about other school districts. But mine, starting around 4th grade, you are put in the "normal" math group, a "faster" one, or a "slower" one (not that they'd call it that) up until you reach 9th grade. Going into 9th grade, you would be in pre-algebra, algebra, or geometry. Starting at geometry, you could (in principle) finish that course in one half of the school year and move on to algebra 2 the next. The next year you'd be in trig for half a semester and then go on to finish pre-calc in the latter half. Scheduling conflicts and other graduation requirements throw a wrench in this machine, but it is possible to finish pre-calc at the end of your sophomore year in high school (my schools didn't offer anything beyond that, but you could take stats and the like for elective credits).
So yeah: you have a good bit of freedom starting at 9th grade in America. You can use that freedom however you like so long as you also complete the required courses to graduate.

Ahh. I see.

Yeah, there is in pre-college/university levels "higher" and "lower" ability classes but these are really meaningless distinctions. They don't move onto more advanced courses any faster, they don't do any different a curriculum either from the other classes. You can't start a level 2 course until you're 16-18 (depends on territory), you can't start a level four until a certain age etc.

Other than age being a core entry factor European education standards vary wildly. Some countries have high school leaving certificates that are more than enough for going straight into a degree, others require two years of post-high school study to go to college. Others issue qualifications that aren't even recognized by other European states as valid. Some of them even have other requirements to be able to even score a certain grade. Luxembourg and some of the other minor/city states are the most infamous in that you are "capped" in all subjects based on a Luxembourgish language exam for that level; even if the exam you're taking is in another language (i.e: If you got 70% in the language exam, the highest you can score on any other exam is 70%).