Education

[Tuffguy]

Yeah, it does pay off. Literally, at times. I earned way more waiting tables than I did when I worked at a Christian bookstore.

When you were working those jobs, did you find that people made assumptions about your intelligence based on what you were doing?

My jobs where more 'individual contributor' then 'service oriented'. I had to deal with mainly tradesmen and other people in the same position as myself.
My bosses had alot of respect for me since in the near future, i would have more education then them.

 

[VozNocturna]

People have 'standards', yes, or 'preferences' or anyways some reasons to why they're attracted in a romantic way to someone and want to be with them but don't feel the same way for others. Those things might be something very difficult to exactly put your finger on. Everyone's free to write a list of their 'standards' if they want to and if they're able to, but when publishing one's lists (whether superficial or other ones), I'd advise a Christian to try to be considerate toward those who don't feel very good about themselves. Seeing your Christian brothers and sisters consistently listing characteristics that you feel out of reach as being the desirable ones could be depressive to someone

:

Oooh.... I see your point. I guess my response was a bit defensive.

I think you have to love yourself in spite of other people's lists. Remember, most of the people making these "lists" are single. All of my happily married friends threw their lists out the window...to an extent. They discarded the superficial stuff and focused more on character and similar values.

There was a poster on this thread who said that we should have the same qualifications that we expect in a significant other, I couldn't agree more. I think a lot of people have lists that they probably couldn't measure up to. I really don't have a list. When I meet someone, I can observe certain things about them that let me know whether or not I need to even entertain them...for me, it boils down to God and morality.

I agree with Lovethroughintellect that our society is obsessed with credentials than with true knowledge. Education has become commodified into something to do and is no longer a state of mind. Some of the smartest people are not necessarily the best students in terms of test-taking.

With that said, I don't care how many degrees a man has, for me, he MUST be educated...as in well-read and articulate.

 

[JPPT1974]

I had some bad jobs too
As well as not made some good grades
In school and especially in college
While I was born with a left-brain or
Whatever you call that.
Guess never found that "pure luck" in my
Life just yet.

 

[faithgoeson]

I could care less what education anyone has. That doesn't impress me one bit.

 

[LOVEthroughINTELLECT]

I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but you say it as though anybody who is a cashier is bottom of the barrel...

I was not expecting that.

I simply said that formal post-secondary education is not for everybody. And that, believe it or not, the position of cashier is well-suited for some people.

In other words, the job of cashier is an honorable job that some people are both good at and more than happy with.

Every individual has his/her own unique package of knowledge, aptitudes, skills, personality, character, etc. that is best suited for particular places in the formal or informal economy. And every individual has his/her own unique needs, goals, values and ideals that are best met/realized through particular places in the formal or informal economy. People should be able to take their place in the formal or informal economy without having their ambition, work ethic, character, etc. questioned.

When people say that there is something wrong with a person if that person is "merely" a cashier and is not seeking more training or formal education or is not building wealth with which to leave the position of cashier, they are failing to appreciate that that person may be in a position in the economy that best suits him/her and that he/she is happy with.

I fail to see how any of my above and earlier analysis and commentary says that anybody who is a cashier is "bottom of the barrel".

 

[LOVEthroughINTELLECT]

It may not be cheap over all (if you look at all the subsidized aspect of it) but community colleges are pretty darn cheap. I got my AS at a very good community college for about 1200 per semester. That is cheap.
Later on i was paying about 10,000 per semester at a private engineering school.

On my example of a person who is a career cashier...that is all well and good, but that person isn't for me. The question is how important is education? Not, what vocations do you respect.

You have missed my point.

Maybe I would make my point better by copying and pasting what I wrote in [thread=2004536]this thread[/thread] about the essay The Radicalism of the Liberal Arts Tradition:


"...I think the point of the essay is that the liberal arts tradition is a worldview.

Nobody is going to mistake Accounting, Finance, Computer Science, Hospitality Management, etc. for a worldview.

I have thought for a long time that business and government should take complete responsibility for training their workers rather than depending on elementary, secondary and higher education to train their workforce. Meanwhile, elementary, secondary and higher education should concentrate entirely on teaching and advancing the liberal arts.

PhDs are already choosing research positions in industry and government over positions in academics. If business and government were to take complete responsibility for training their workers--be it with their own facilities and staff or through contracting with business, technical and trade schools--then all of the RND researchers would end up in those sectors as well. That would leave purely academic, scholarly researchers at colleges and universities. History, Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, the social sciences, the fine arts, the design arts such as Architecture and Interior Design, and the pure hard sciences, among others, would likely then flourish and advance with unprecedented vitality.

All fields and disciplines overlap, of course. It is not possible for students to learn the poetry and art of Architecture and Interior Design the best they can without also studying and mastering the technical considerations that are inherent in their mediums. Meanwhile, computer scientists and civil engineers can't study and practice their highly technical professions without also learning about the social and humanistic context of and impact of the work. Nonetheless, I think that the liberal arts tradition and the technical/managerial professions have distinct goals and outlooks and the system of education and workforce training should be structured around those distinctions. Both enterprises would then likely thrive more and realize more of their potential.

I think we ask elementary, secondary and higher educational institutions to do too much. Academically inclined teachers everywhere are frustrated with not being able to actually teach and be scholars. To survive they have to give their attention to meeting the demands of government, corporations, and parents who want their kids to "succeed". Credentialism, "success", standardized test scores and the "shortage", not scholarship, motivate formal education in contemporary America (I don't know about other countries). But then when people see that we are graduating a bunch of robots with little exposure to and appreciation of culture and ethics, the educators in elementary, secondary and higher education are--surprise, surprise--criticized for failing to do their jobs.

The liberal arts tradition and the technical/managerial professions both play an important role in our lives. But, I assert that they are distinct roles. The system of education-as-workforce-training has blurred the distinction and weakened both enterprises in their role. The point is not to agree or disagree with Lears' politics. The value of Lears' essay is in how it pulls the liberal arts tradition out of our blurred system of formal education and makes the distinction clear again."

 

[Suomipoika]

Oooh.... I see your point. I guess my response was a bit defensive.

Well on the internet it's just easy to read a post quickly, a little out of context and somehow get a picture that the writer is criticizing you or generally typing their message with a "" face, when they might actually be writing with a "". Smilies are one way to ease the interpretation in an ambiguous case, but the only surefire way, I guess, would be to know the person or at least to "know" them from a longer period of time over the internet.

I think you have to love yourself in spite of other people's lists. Remember, most of the people making these "lists" are single. All of my happily married friends threw their lists out the window...to an extent. They discarded the superficial stuff and focused more on character and similar values.

I agree that everyone should love themselves and that those 'lists' aren't meant to offend anyone. But I've known some people suffering from depression, and maybe it's just that I'm looking through my "wanna-be-a-shrink" lenses when I'm considering such extreme cases where someone who looks up to you as an older Christian hears/reads that your ideal girl/guy, mostly a girl, would posses all the 'great' qualities that (s)he feels (s)he can never reach, then reacts like "screw you and your perfect godly girls, I don't need your God either". I know, that's a very extreme scenario, and I'm not saying that I've been in a situation exactly like that, but I've seen an experienced something that has made me a little cautious about these things. But yeah, kind of taking things to extremes. As for myself, and as for moderating those extremes a little bit, you can notice a different kind of tune in the post where I was trying to throw some crazy jokes about these 'lists', but no-one seemed to laugh. I swear that at least some people on here have changed their minds as for things like education.

 

[Tuffguy]

You have missed my point.

Maybe I would make my point better by copying and pasting what I wrote in [thread=2004536]this thread[/thread] about the essay The Radicalism of the Liberal Arts Tradition:


"...I think the point of the essay is that the liberal arts tradition is a worldview.

Nobody is going to mistake Accounting, Finance, Computer Science, Hospitality Management, etc. for a worldview.

I have thought for a long time that business and government should take complete responsibility for training their workers rather than depending on elementary, secondary and higher education to train their workforce. Meanwhile, elementary, secondary and higher education should concentrate entirely on teaching and advancing the liberal arts.

PhDs are already choosing research positions in industry and government over positions in academics. If business and government were to take complete responsibility for training their workers--be it with their own facilities and staff or through contracting with business, technical and trade schools--then all of the RND researchers would end up in those sectors as well. That would leave purely academic, scholarly researchers at colleges and universities. History, Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, the social sciences, the fine arts, the design arts such as Architecture and Interior Design, and the pure hard sciences, among others, would likely then flourish and advance with unprecedented vitality.

All fields and disciplines overlap, of course. It is not possible for students to learn the poetry and art of Architecture and Interior Design the best they can without also studying and mastering the technical considerations that are inherent in their mediums. Meanwhile, computer scientists and civil engineers can't study and practice their highly technical professions without also learning about the social and humanistic context of and impact of the work. Nonetheless, I think that the liberal arts tradition and the technical/managerial professions have distinct goals and outlooks and the system of education and workforce training should be structured around those distinctions. Both enterprises would then likely thrive more and realize more of their potential.

I think we ask elementary, secondary and higher educational institutions to do too much. Academically inclined teachers everywhere are frustrated with not being able to actually teach and be scholars. To survive they have to give their attention to meeting the demands of government, corporations, and parents who want their kids to "succeed". Credentialism, "success", standardized test scores and the "shortage", not scholarship, motivate formal education in contemporary America (I don't know about other countries). But then when people see that we are graduating a bunch of robots with little exposure to and appreciation of culture and ethics, the educators in elementary, secondary and higher education are--surprise, surprise--criticized for failing to do their jobs.

The liberal arts tradition and the technical/managerial professions both play an important role in our lives. But, I assert that they are distinct roles. The system of education-as-workforce-training has blurred the distinction and weakened both enterprises in their role. The point is not to agree or disagree with Lears' politics. The value of Lears' essay is in how it pulls the liberal arts tradition out of our blurred system of formal education and makes the distinction clear again."

I hear what you're saying. I don't think its relative to this thread, but i'll comment.

Heres what i think needs to happen. Remove the government completely from education. Every school should be a private school. This would do two things,,,
1) Decrease everyones taxes by a HUGE amount
2) Allow private funding of schools. The good ones would flurish, the ones run poorly would die.
3) Prevent the governent from teaching what the government wants to teach to further its own distructive ends.

More back to your point. I don't think you can separate the arts from the sciences. Classic liberal arts education used to include aggressive math courses like calc. It was truely a very broad, yet challanging education. Theses days liberal arts is a major in drinking and getting high, since they have so much free time.

I don't think we ask elementary schools and middle schools to do too much. They are teaching too much nonsense and not enough of the basics.

 

[Silver Speak]

I'd try to be careful about what kind of lists of 'qualifications' or 'standards' I publish

I think they're hardly actual standards. It's just people stating what they're attracted to and although things might turn out quite the opposite, not all of it is necessarily superficial and bad plus it's all individual taste. Seeing as most of us are not gonna date someone else from this forum I don't see it as a big deal. I don't know how I could be offended if someone I've never met disregarded me as not his type. Yes, you have to be considerate but...it's really no big deal. It's just some useless fun. It'd like, you hear girls go on and on about some Johnny Depp or whoever but that's just talk.

On my example of a person who is a career cashier...that is all well and good, but that person isn't for me. The question is how important is education? Not, what vocations do you respect.

Well, honestly, it does make me wonder if there's a person that truly does enjoy it. I will cry with joy when I'm done with it. However, hard work has always been a value in my family and I was brought up to do my best, whatever it is I do. Hey, if it's no fun it grows character, right?? Anyway, I like to think of it as just a phase; I save up, I finish, I find another job or go to school.

I think you have to love yourself in spite of other people's lists.

Exactly.

With that said, I don't care how many degrees a man has, for me, he MUST be educated...as in well-read and articulate.

You know what you want, I think that's all well and good My 'list' has shrunk noticably as I've grown older but I still have things that I don't think I could compromise in, such as, say (I know it's a cliche but) sense of humor. I don't think that's superficial. It's just common in people I feel drawn to. Period. Sure, the lists reach ridiculous extents when you start listing the bands they must like, the color of their eyes and blah blah blah. Then you're just making up a person that you're never gonna run into.

 

[Suomipoika]

Yes, you have to be considerate but...it's really no big deal. It's just some useless fun. It'd like, you hear girls go on and on about some Johnny Depp or whoever but that's just talk.

Yep, and u know, girls be girls. After all, gals are just good to have around no matter how often they'd babble about their johnnydepps.

As for the subject here, 'course it's easy to see how especially a girl will expect a man to be someone who makes an effort to keep the family together, using finances responsibly etc. I guess it depends on the case how big a role a formal education has.

 

[Silver Speak]

After all, gals are just good to have around no matter how often they'd babble about their johnnydepps.

I think I'll just start talking about him non-stop.

 

[Suomipoika]

I think I'll just start talking about him non-stop.

What did I just say?? 'Cos what I meant to say was "after all, gals are just good to have rounded up when they start to babble about their johnnydepps".

 

[Silver Speak]

What did I just say?? 'Cos what I meant to say was "after all, gals are just good to have rounded up when they start to babble about their johnnydepps".

Lalalalalaa, can't hear you!