Education and you

Wow FaceySpace lately has been a great place to find topics to rant on... This picture just came across my feed and my jaw just dropped to the ground when I read some of the comments.  So instead of getting into an argument with the 'sharer' of this photo I figured I would make a post with all my thoughts in it at once.

So lets start with my obvious question.  If you want free tuition, then who is to stop companies from requiring you to go to college to get your lowest level entry job, to REQUIRE a college degree.  This is my first issue with 'free' college, note the '' around it, cause those who have any idea about these things realize that it would not be free it would be saddled with money from the job creators, referenced in my previous post and those job creators would then require you to have used the education they are providing to get even a mop jockey job, at least this is where I see it leading.

Now lets move onto what I feel is a real solution.  Let's fix the lower education (Grade-, Middle-, High-School) so that you can come out of school with the equivalent of a degree in the arts, history, a trade etc.  Hell if you ask me coming out of High-School you should be able to fill an IT Help Desk position, and then the company you are with can offer or allow you to go back to school to get the more interesting degrees.

Some of my own thoughts on Education are as follows

Not all teachers deserve to have tenure.  Unions do as much or more harm to the education system than good.  The current set up of education in this country is broken, not because of what or how the teachers teach but because of when they teach, and how students are just pushed along from one grade to the next, yes some will always rise and some will fall based on their abilities, but we shouldn't just shove the students through.  Testing of various sorts should show that a student is ready to advance, not the factory line like atmosphere just to get a graduation rate.

Arts should be used as a tool rather than looked at as the Red Headed step child of the educational process, the arts provide a person with the ability to think outside of the box, to get creative with their mind and give them the ability to critically think.  Cutting these programs is at the expense of our students not to the benefit of the schools.  As many studies have proved music and math are very much tied to one another for example.  Students who learn to play an instrument, be it piano, drums, trumpet, or flute, skew higher in math and science than those who do not.

So in short I think that we truly need to look at our lower educational institutions the ones that are already free and get them working properly and leave the college education, to the topics that need college educations...