College education

[jason4liberty]

I am not sure how to link to another thread, hope this works:

Autodidact: The Unnecessary Leper

First, let’s differentiate. There’s education, and there’s training. Employers, mostly, are more interested in training, and I’d argue that it makes more sense to rely on institutions and pieces of paper when it comes to training, whereas for education they’re pretty much useless. I’d say education can take place more effectively in a library than a school, but not training. I’ll trust a self-trained philosopher, but not so much a self-trained nurse. Even vocational and licensing testing don’t w…

You can also search mises on “autodidact” to find the thread if the link doesn’t work.

I believe that there was an external link in this thread to an article that compared Training to Education. The point of the article was that college used to be much more self directed and was used to teach people to think with dispassion. It contrasts this to the modern definition of college “education”, which is really more of a training exercise for basic skills. One of the major points was that just about everyone is trainable, but that very few people are capable of being educated in the classical sense. On that plank it sounded quite elitist to me, but when I look around my poor old USA I perhaps find evidence that the statement is true. I believe that the principles on which freedom rest are reached with cool logic. It seems that cool logic is in short supply, and that entertainment, herd mentality, “protect me from myself”, and misplaced trust in officials are everywhere. Too many people don’t want to think for themselves.