The real purpose of education is to turn people into intellectuals. Industry does not want to simply hire people who know exactly how to do the job. Industry wants to hire people who are intellectual, and they do this by hiring college grads.
Now certainly the value of a diploma as a measure of intellectual curiosity has gone down dramatically, but I believe this was the original reason.
I don't think this was ever true. You can read about the European universities centuries ago and even back then they were about getting the children of the rich to socialize and drink a lot. More recently Jefferson said his time at William & Mary was waste of time, mostly drinking and riding and such. In the same period teenagers like Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Thomas Paine self educated to high levels of sophistication while working full time. In the case of John Paul Jones he was a ship hand from age 13 on at sea for months at a time, for crying out loud.
I really think the institutions of higher education have historically boiled down to the library. Books were extremely expensive and it made sense to collect them in one place for common use.
To be usefully educated about anything now is a lifelong process. This idea that there's something special about four years of the much longer process is a bit silly.
The idea is that a, colleges move to you places you'd never be (I have friends at NYU and Dublin who absolutely are getting more out of the locale than they are anything else), and b, because college is specifically made so that people can learn, you'll attract a purer blend of people, all of whom are interested in learning.
For the most part, that latter point is absolute bullshit. College has become so psychologically mandatory in the United States that people go to college whether or not they're truly interested in learning. And while I love the idea of liberal arts learning, and while hopefully if I stay I'll learn things I'd never thought to learn otherwise, the fact of the matter is that as colleges defocus themselves, there's less of an emphasis on really bright people who are going to blaze through early college to get to a meaningful level. In my classes, I'm learning to program in Processing and Scratch, for instance: one is a kid's language, for crying out loud, and for the other, I can't see the point of using Processing rather than Java. In my other classes, I'm learning to use Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, both programs that I have a good deal of familiarity with. It's an absolute waste, and my professors absolutely realize this, but they have no choice because other kids don't know a thing about programming, and the course that I'm in makes these classes absolutely mandatory.
As for the kids being enlightened and focused: don't get me started. At the time of this writing, one kid is in trouble because he brought tons of kids to his house and they threw up and now he's refusing to apologize to his parents because, as he puts it, "I'm in college. This should be expected behavior." Same kid told a real knee-slapper about stealing four thousand dollars while working at a Target. I mean, it makes for an amusing story, but it's despicable. And I'm in a pretty top-notch school, for what it's worth.
No, people who are really fascinated in learning nowadays tend to try and be practical about what they know: I'd bet that the brightest people of college age are doing things like trying to create start-ups, or at the very least trying to earn a living with the skills they've got.
You should try harder to get around this. I've never had a problem getting "mandatory" requirements waived.
If you don't manage to waive the classes, but are indeed hot shit, you should be able to crank out a semester's work in a day or two sometime early on. Professor might be more impressed/willing to waive when you turn in every problem, solved, on day one.
I'm pretty sure that Gingrich who is a professor, and every other republican who has ever considered the question in any way, recognizes the use and purpose of calculus and biology. But don't let reason get in the way of your mindless contempt.
The real purpose of education is to turn people into intellectuals
No, it isn't, unless you are talking about highly selective liberal arts colleges. And even then, the best you are going to get are 3rd generation photocopies of Susan Sontag.
Industry wants to hire people who are intellectual
No it doesn't. Period. Even the relatively "creative" jobs like software engineering want a fundamental skill set and raw intelligence, not the ability to quote Chomsky.
Reminds me of something Seth Godin (?) once said - that the whole purpose of school is to institutionalize mediocrity
That quote, however, is spot-on. Anything that doesn't focus on the best and brightest hurts the best and brightest in a way. And the fact that they survive despite this is a sign of those people ignoring the system rather than of the system's working. I wrote a lengthy post about this long long ago: can't find the link, apparently subjects delete themselves here?, but my point was that by making a system that was hostile to people like that, while ensuring it possible to live without the system, American school systems encourage people driven by ambition to become successes. It's why we have such a powerful entrepreneurial drive in the country.
I wish I could find the link, though, because I said it better back then.
No, it isn't, unless you are talking about highly selective liberal arts colleges. And even then, the best you are going to get are 3rd generation photocopies of Susan Sontag.
It would seem to me that that IS the purpose of education, especially a technical one. To me the definition of intellectual is a person who is always seeking to learn new things and better themselves educationally. In a field like engineering where things are constantly changing, the intellectually minded will be on the cutting edge and will be the ones you want to surround yourself with.
PS: And yes the English department was insanely hard for a public school, but I still got a CS degree while taking 4 English classes, 2 history classes, art, music, horseback riding etc. They even force philosophy majors to take take a single collage level math class.
Right, but the people who have the ability to quote Chomsky may be able to transfer that skill and quote Knuth or Sedgewick instead.
if you had a real education you would know that chomsky's initial ground-breaking work was in language structure, and his work is used widely in compsci texts on automaton theory
so you basically just got fucked by your own defense of ignorance