Higher Academic Education: a Road to Servitude?

The Labourer and Artisan, notwithstanding they are Servants to their Masters, are quit by doing what they are bid.

But the Tyrant sees those that are about him, begging ... for his Favour; and they must not only do what he commands, but they must think as he would have them [think] … It is not sufficient to obey him, they must also please him, they must harass, [and] torment themselves in his Service.

Is this to live happily? Does it indeed deserve the Name of Life?

– E. De La Boetie, A Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Technical and Skills Education, known also as Vocational Education, has long been a dumping ground for students whose benighted teachers and school counselors have thought them to be “not suited” for higher “academic” studies, when, in many cases, what they lacked was maturity, docility, or refined manners.

They great irony of this 21st Century is that along with an ever increasing ardor for college life, high school graduates do not, in increasing numbers, come to the university with what many consider the requisite level of preparation to succeed at their studies.

Parents and students have been oversold on the idea that finishing college with a high G.P.A. is automatically the road to a good life, a future in the Seat of Command and Respect. But unless students acquire needed economic skills along the way, the likelihood is that they will end up, at best, in a large organizational environment, perhaps, even with a comfortable salary. And they will spend their lives “playing office politics,” catering to the whims of higher-ups, rather than producing desired goods or services. (Think of the cartoon, Dilbert -- it is not, by any means, based on pure imagination!)

This is what has happened in public education where politicians, courts and other distantly situated Masters endeavor to remove the last vestiges of professional decision-making from those most closely connected to schoolkids.

To examine these issues further, see "Tracking" in Public Education: preparation for the world of work?


Cordially
--- EGR