Comment by LudwigNagasena | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LudwigNagasena | Hacker News Reader

It’s time to break up the education system from all the extracurricular fluff. The universities are fostering identities around themselves: students join debate teams, sports teams, religious groups , orchestra, etc under the aegis of their universities and attach their personal identities to these things.

To me personally it seems kind of ridiculous. What if you are a young adult who is interested in trades, but you want to play in an orchestra. You can’t access an orchestra (there are seven of them in Harvard!) of any of your local universities. You can’t even join a university gym that probably has far cheaper fees than any other gym in your area. You want to take classes in Shaolin Kempo Karate? We are sorry but you can’t because you didn’t pass “holistic” assessment of your personality by Harvard. What a weird situation where your whole social life as a young adult completely depends on assessment of your personality by gerontic professors who need to fill some quotas.

Particularly when they're looking for the important personality trait of not Asian.

>>> What if you are a young adult who is interested in trades, but you want to play in an orchestra.

Play the bassoon. ;-) A friend of mine who was a school music teacher told me that getting good at the bassoon was pretty much a ticket to a generous college scholarship. Not necessarily at your first choice of scholarship, but somewhere.

If they can't get a student to play bassoon, then they have to hire a ringer from the community. So you could also do that.

>Play the bassoon. ;-) A friend of mine who was a school music teacher told me that getting good at the bassoon was pretty much a ticket to a generous college scholarship.

Reminds me of Oxford and Cambridge's organ scholarships, which are also the only way to apply and be admitted to both universities for undergraduate study.

Well it lets you apply to both, but how can you be admitted to both?

Maybe it's different in public universities (or just the universities that I've seen), but I went to one and the on campus activities are pretty available to the general public who don't attend the university. There are few things that are locked down to students only and I know cases where non-students talk to the club organizers to get exceptions.

As long as its a privately run social credit system dictating the available choices in your life its fine

You can usually audit classes of local universities. I’ve done it, and I recommend it!

>You can’t access an orchestra

Maybe we could fund the arts more easily if we properly taxed the billionaires in our society. Harvard can afford it, there's no reason we can't afford elsewhere in our modern era of unimaginable wealth and plenty. We instead find it preferable to allow some people to hoard that wealth and plenty like fantasy dragons in caves instead of using it for the benefit of all of society.

You essentially want institutions to bend to your will?

Good luck with that...

Why don't you go out and build from the ground up/front money to building a place solely for those "just interested in trades"

They essentially want institutions to be less involved in their community and social circles. Why should educational institutions be allowed to monopolize social groups in the first place?

Well, once upon a time, likely not too long ago, politicians that were voted in decided to establish a framework in which this was possible/prevailed.

For those who personally don't like it, I don't know what to tell you. Your ideology is clearly a minority, and the only way minorities will get what they want in a capitalistic system is through large amounts of money.

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