07-13-2017, 11:27 AM
(07-13-2017, 09:06 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-12-2017, 08:26 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...OK, so there aren't enough desirable jobs to go around in a culture in which a BA degree is normal. Sure, menial work seems like a waste of talent, as does most semi-skilled work.
I'd agree that we spending a lot of effort and money providing people with a better education than they need. In a lot of ways people are spending a lot of time, money and youth on not much. If you take on the usual perspective of cutting the fat, educating only enough educated people to do jobs that require an education, it makes sense to cut schools and students.
The real justification for education beyond the K-12 level adequate for churning out laborers, sales clerks, and servants is that it improves people. It shows people that there is more to life than raw hedonism and passive entertainment as a reward for doing mind-numbing, soul-crushing, ache-generating work. The hazard to the Establishment is that laborers and servants will get educated and recognize that life is more than raw hedonism and passive entertainment as a reward for doing mind-numbing, soul-crushing, ache-generating work.
Sure, it is an ugly stereotype, but I have known people who return from a menial job only to put what used to be called a TV dinner in a microwave oven and zap it for a minute and a half (the difference between this and the old TV dinner is that the original TV dinner went into a convection oven and took thirty minutes to cook), remove the food from the microwave, and go to an easy chair in front of a TV and watch witless programming. About an hour after 'dinner' is completed the people go to the pantry for chips and the refrigerator for beer or sugary sodas and watch another five hours of bad TV.
I cannot do that. But I have a college degree, and I insist upon more sophistication in my idea of what constitutes a good life. I may still be stuck with a job that I hate, but that is the norm in a hierarchical, inequitable (and with Donald Trump and successors that Corporate America wants for us, increasingly so with the potential of authoritarian repression).
Quote:There are other times I also consider the alleged post scarcity economy. There are more people than jobs, and this is apt to get worse. Do we put a lot of college professors, support staff, not to mention students out out on the streets looking for jobs? From the scarcity perspective, isn't the objective to create jobs of any sort to give folks a chance to participate in the economy? Is the side effect of having a population of well educated folk with fairly useless skills all that bad?
Just trying to think outside the box. I learned that in college...
I think of reality as a hierarchy of boxes, one inside another. By thinking outside one box, we get the desire and will to escape one box and into one with more room. Of course, we can all be shoved into the old box that we took delight in leaving. Part of that is of economic reality not of our making. But there are contradictions between fitting some economic roles and having learned things that make cultural stereotypes of those roles incompatible.
So you become a driver of a delivery truck despite having a liberal arts degree. Maybe you took some courses in accounting and economics, so you know that your fellow drivers are badly exploited and you can explain to them that they are exploited. If there is a union you might be a good shop steward. If there is no union, then who is better suited to found one?
...Or after a couple years hustling underwear, maybe police work isn't so bad after all. You discover that you have more likelihood of pulling someone out of a lethal or crippling situation than of plugging some thug. With a bullet-proof
vest and a service revolver you are more likely to survive a shooting -- and kill a crook You go to the ER and find a minor bruise; the crook goes to the morgue. (Cops are more likely to be killed in vehicle crashes than in attacks by offenders. So if you get called to a nasty situation -- a family argument or a bar brawl -- your training in the humanities make you a better negotiator.
...or you find meaning in charitable work (nice for getting connections for dating and mating) or in some creative activity. After enough unpaid trial and error you are as good as anyone making a living at that. You change your line of work to fit your abilities.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.