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Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

(www.nytimes.com)
388 points pseudolus | 2 comments | 25 Mar 25 17:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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fullshark ◴[25 Mar 25 17:21 UTC] No.43473662[source]▶
Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink, it was basically modified finishing school for rich capital owners, needing to make their children of proper class before they could take over their businesses.

It then became a vocational degree for the working class, despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees. The only value is that you could talk the talk and become a member of the professional managerial class if you impressed the right hiring committee/individual.

In spite of this, we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree, and be in debt for the rest of their working life.

It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).

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dionidium ◴[27 Mar 25 14:45 UTC] No.43494210[source]▶
In order to rethink Bachelor Degrees, one must first rethink high school. It is routine in the US to see schools where 1) <=5% of the student body is proficient in math; but also 2) the school has a 90% graduation rate.

If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.

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1. SkyBelow ◴[27 Mar 25 15:31 UTC] No.43494701[source]▶
We need to admit schools are babysitting kids and not teaching them anymore. A few kids can still learn, but so many others don't. Especially the one who would learn in a better environment, but whose class is disrupted by 1 or 2 students preventing their education. Once a student gets behind a year, they aren't going to ever catch up if they are only passed on to the next year instead of being identified as someone who needs to repeat the year.

Edit: I should have been clearer in "are increasingly babysitting" and not been as strong as indicating it as some universal truth. I hear horror stories from teachers about how much of their time is focused on classroom management, how little on actual education, and how much effort it put into processes so the grades stay up regardless.

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2. elric ◴[27 Mar 25 17:06 UTC] No.43495626[source]▶
I wonder if alternative forms of education (like Waldorf/Steiner) would make more sense to more kids. It's clear that the standard way of teaching doesn't resonate with many kids, and we would do well to investigate that.