Schools and their focus on Careers and Colleges

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Can anyone tell me why? Schools do things like College/Career Day, force students to take classes on things like what is and what isn't acceptable on resumes and all this and that and a lot of the time, if you don't go to college you're treated like scum at least at the schools I've attended. Most of those things are absolutely worthless and just annoy. Schools also, when they do, try to teach something that will be helpful, they teach a runned down version that is near worthless in the long run. My last high school tried to do this programming curriculum, which could be very helpful. I didn't need it as I'm an alright programmer before hand but when I saw the stuff they were learning I was disgusted. It's little games two year olds can do given a little practice. Teaching that to high schoolers? Seriously, that's like taking a kid, showing him how to ride a bike with training wheels and then when he has that down, throwing him into a cross country bike race and expecting him to win. He'll get destroyed.

Teachers are no help at all. Whenever stuff gets to me, they usually ask me "What are you going to do if you can't get a job or go to college? You should think about that." I wish I could say "In fact, I do think about that a lot. So much so that every situation I can think of ends badly so I end up just depressed and suicidal at the end of the thinking session. There's nothing I can do and there's nothing you can do to fix this. You say I need to learn how to function in a group, well I've said, I know, and you've seen that I can't. I do not fit into the plan your superiors tell you to assimilate us into, and I don't ever want to. So please, go away!" I wish I could say things like that, but I can't.

It's like schools changed their focus from educating kids to making them complete suck ups so they can get a job. When did schools start doing stuff like this? Why? It does nothing. Except get people mad or depressed.

Why? Because without a college degree (specifically in science, technology, engineering or maths), your chances of being able to support yourself enough to actually enjoy life are very slim indeed.

Sure, some very successful people never earned a college degree, but those people had unique skills that enabled them to exploit the few opportunities that came their way. Some others were living Horatio Alger stories, having to work, work, work until they became wealthy and powerful.

But if you think that you may be the next Bill Gates or Thomas Edison, think again. It isn't likely that you are working on the next Great Operating System, or the Perfect Light Bulb. The markets for such technology are largely in the hands of a few giant corporations, which jealously guard their already dwindling shares of thes markets.

So get your college degree, and maybe one of those corporations will hire you and keep you on long enough to carve out your own niche in the global marketplace. Otherwise, work on developing skills in retail.

Career days is to get you focused on your future career. Without them, some students would not plan ahead with their lives but wait until graduation day (or later) before starting to think about it. A school is only as good as what it produces in the end. If the entire graduating class decided to not go to college and "bum out" for the rest of their lives, how would that be perceived by others? Outsiders would think that the school must not have taught them the right stuff to succeed in life then. That is just one reason why high schools push students toward finding a career to live by.

I used to love career days because I already knew what I wanted to do (and where I wanted to go) from an early age. Certain area community colleges, trade schools, 4-year colleges and universities would all come to my school to try to get students motivated to come to their school. I would listen to them do their song and dance for a while, then tell them that I am strictly a scientist at heart and will be going in that direction. If they did not have anything relevant to tell me about their programs, I would simply move on to the next group. To me, it was a day to play with them, not the other way around.

The only thing to keep in mind here is that schools must teach to the majority. And the majority of people have to get jobs. And, the college focus is, of course, that the unemployment rate for people with degrees if half of what it is for people without one. And, yes, sadly enough, the #1 way to get a job is for people to like you, so it's valuable to the majority to be exposed to that truth at a young age.

As for the remedial nature of the classes that *could* actually be useful, I complained about the same when I was in high school. My first drafting class, we did drills with hand drawing and hand-lettering... but, even then, CAD was starting to take over and paper drafting wasn't even taught at the colleges or trade schools by the time I got there. Of course, with technology-based courses, things can change so fast, and the teachers would have to keep ahead of the curve and change their curriculum to match... I can imagine that would be a struggle if they're teaching many different kinds of classes.

I understand being depressed because everyone around you seems to be doing such mental things and, even worse, expect you to do them, too.

I was never happy going through school, I wasn't happy at the restaurant and retail jobs I had to work to support myself (living with my parents was not an option)... some customers will scream at you if you don't smile or complain about you if you don't smile 'right' (whatever that means). My roomates were a similar strain. Being homeless was actually the easiest. Hardly any 'things' to worry about, no big bills and no people to live with and deal with 24/7.

Once I was working with people who accepted me being weird, I had that constant and I could just put my head down and do my work and it was the stability I was always looking for. I did get married, and I have a couple kids, so I'm not living alone anymore. But, really, it's my rules. lol. Dood wouldn't have married me if he couldn't put up with my oddities, and my kids just accept things are the way they are.

I still feel like **** about myself sometimes, usually when one of my coworkers wives comments about how weird I am or tries to force me into vacuous discussions... it makes me feel like an out of place person again (must be on the wrong planet). I kind of wonder if the stability and contentment I've built for myself is imaginary... but, then I realize I live in it all the time, it's the rest of society that's imaginary now.

This is hilarious.
I hated career days. The entire large gymnasium would be filled with reps from unis and trade schools and a couple of large local employers who did internship programs. That would be bad enough... until you had the hundreds of students. I usually spent those days hiding in the bathrooms.

Even now, I'm not a huge fan. We have college fairs here at work, and they set up in our cafeteria, which is quite small. So, not a large crowd, but, still crowded, and noisy, most of the educational reps and potential students seem to be women... the high-pitched speech and occasional squeals and giggles is enough to drive me wild.
And they can never tell me about any degree program related to the coursework I started and want to finish (MS in Applied Analytics). They come prepared to talk about business and other things, but, can't tell me about any of the components of the IT degrees, let alone whether my credits will transfer. ~grins~ I'm not quite to the point of playing with them, but, I admire that you could.

I agree completely. Many people have seen the Internet meme about the 8th Grade final exam of 1895 and how it expected a generalized knowledge about subjects about which even most college graduates couldn't perform well. I revisited the test today and decided to click on the Snopes.com commentary http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp about this meme. The commentary never dismissed the test as a hoax, so the test must have some kind of credibility or convincing provenance. Instead, the commentary apologized for the current state of testing and, by extension, learning. It claimed that "...If a 40-year-old can't score as well on a geography test as a high school student who just spent several weeks memorizing the names of all the rivers in South America in preparation for an exam, that doesn't mean the 40-year-old's education was woefully deficient — it means the [sic] he simply didn't retain information for which he had no use, no matter how thoroughly it was drilled into his brain through rote memory some twenty-odd years earlier." This wisdom coming from a web site which uses the word "the" instead of the correct word "that". Moreover, the commentator(s) misunderstand what benefits come from "learning how to learn" and "knowing how to know." By teaching 8th grade American children in 1895 arcane information even for then, their knowledge showed them (as it would us, too) that "there's a world outside of Yonkers" and that they could know more about other things by knowing about things of which they had never heard. Learning Latin doesn't imply only that a student is planning a career in teaching Latin to other future students ad infinitum. It means that the student will understand the Latin roots of several more languages and probably gain an appreciation of etimology. This is just one example of the infamous 8th Grade test.

Educators since 1895 have obviously been encouraged by big business and government to "train" (not "educate") students to be good little worker bees; drones who have no appreciation of the knowledge they have. Sure, that is good for the sweatshop workplace, but it does nothing to inspire. Business and government have learned that for most students, getting a minimum-wage job with just the occasional electronic toy being made affordable to them is all that they need to survive while the owners and elected officials get fat.

Educators today don't educate, they "teach the tests" (even Snopes.com admits this) and, by doing so, guarantee a dumbed-down beehive. The odd student who (because of IQ or special interest) learns beyond that goal is the rebel ... the new Galileo.

Two days ago, an Anonymous group republished a commentary about "Psychologist Lists 8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back" http://www.anonhq.com/psychologist-list ... fight-back by clinical psychologist and author Bruce E. Levine.

Levine adds to the idea of a dumbed-down population by examining why young Americans moved from the protest era of the 1950s, 60s and 70s to the current education goal that, "[r]egardless of the subject matter, the main objective in most classrooms is to socialize students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation."

His comments are worth reading.

Everything big got it's start somewhere. There's that maybe. If I'm going to maybe something I'd rather maybe something worth maybe-ing. I'll starve to death before I work in retail.



I know that is true, but what that just reminded me of is the fact that these same schools also try to get kids to be "leaders" so long as they follow certain rules. It's like a strange and deceitful ploy. Like there's a lot of "if you want to do this in life and have this and this and this and decide this and this..." you must do this. It's like an enticement of being a leader by being a follower. My Multimedia teacher used to spend days giving these kinds of rants and he didn't take too kindly that I had my headphones in becuase I received enough of that in a day.

Hey now... some here might take offense to that.

My own personal belief is that if you're doing a job, you take pride in that job, doesn't matter what it is.
I've cleaned toilets & stocked shelves and I've programmed enterprise software, and I remain just as proud of the work I did, no matter what job I was doing.
Like everything, it can be a means to an end, I don't rule anything out.

Me, too! Cleaning toilets was my very first job at age 15 was as a cinema usher (while the movies are running, somebody cleans the restrooms). Many years later and for other reasons, I was invited to the White House to meet with the vice president. Thankfully, I didn't have to clean any restrooms there.

I don't feel "shame" in any job.

But I refuse to be a waiter. You are a servant, in effect, when you are a waiter/waitress. I don't want to be immersed in hierarchy. If I go to a restaurant, I would rather order food from the counter than have a waiter/waitress. In this situation, I don't have to tip, either.

Hehe. My thoughts exactly. I don't mind traditional tipping (for an individual who does a "service" for another), but communal tipping seems to be the norm these days. I don't understand why the Starbucks cashier who records my order and hands me a few coins in change, but never moves from standing at the counter is due anything beyond a sincere "thank you." After all, the barista does all the work for most orders. With mine (drip decaf), I don't feel that dispensing 12 ounces of prepared coffee is all that complicated. In other words, I don't tip my dentist who spends an hour cleaning my teeth, but the teen-ager who hands me a cup of coffee expects it?!?

Yeah, while I don't mind tipping legitimate and welcomed services, I realize that, for most restauranteurs, my tipping their employees is a subsidization of their business expenses. Gee, I would love to own a business where the public was duped into paying for a part of my payroll. No, I would rather the owners simply add 15 percent to their product prices and pay their employees respectful wages. No pretense.

Yeah I know, and if some people love working in retail, that's good on them. I hope they continue to have fun. But for me, I just don't like it.

Haha, I can't say how much I liked it, let's be honest (compared to working mostly by myself as I do now).
But, you make the most of whatever you're doing; I enjoyed taking pride in my work, learning from the nice coworkers, enjoying the good customers, ... and trying to protect myself from the bad.

I worked in 2 fast food places, 2 restaurants, and 3 shops. Why? Cause it's easy to get those jobs because others are too principled to lower their standards that far. Sure, I had to work 2-3 of those at a time to earn decent money, but, whatevs, I did it.