I got through college, a very well-regarded engineering program, putting in the bare minimum effort to graduate.
I make a lot of money now, 20 years later. I attribute none of my success to public education or college, I didn’t learn anything besides our education system (in the US) is not what they tell kids it is growing up.
We beat the drum of education because it seems like a nice simple solution to fix a lot of perceived problems. “Oh you mean if we just throw money at this problem it’ll fix it?!”
Baltimore city gets some of the highest per-student federal funding in the country. My daughter is in a public middle school there, living with her mom. I’m in the burbs with my wife and kids.
She told me just yesterday she wants to go to high school in my district because “well it just seems more normal than city schools”
She also thought California was a country up until yesterday. Straight A student.
At some point, probably too late, we’ll realize we did it a wrong. Floating kids through high school, dropping an anvil of debt around their neck for a college degree they won’t use. Met a fellow the other day, he has his masters in social work. Making very, very good money, as a regional manager of a car sales group, I forget the specifics. Said he never used his degree and he is very grateful he has a clear path to pay the debt off.
I don’t know what the fix is, but I’ve seen enough to know what we do now, ain’t it.
Its strange to say, but its actually thanks to black racism is why we're here.
It started with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
The result was that the courts determined that "aptitude/IQ tests" unfairly discriminated against black people. However, education requirements are not seen as such.
So, we get "decent paying job" requiring 'a degree'. What degree? Doesnt matter. The degree is the legal form of 'we dont hire blacks'. It also has the side effect of 'we dont hire the poors' as well.
Obviously there are positions that require advanced schooling. Im not talking about those.
Griggs says that you can't employ IQ tests to discriminate for jobs where the IQ threshold you established is immaterial to the job. For modern knowledge work, that's a trivial bar to clear. It is essentially the case that Griggs is a nonfactor in white collar employment.
My motivation for calling this out isn't that I'm OK with discriminating against Black people; quite the opposite, in fact. IQ tests aren't used more widely because they aren't effective at qualifying employees. IQ is an idee fixee among A Certain Part Of The Internet, and part of their pitch is that IQ tests are a secret cheat code that would enable hiring purely on merit, if only the woke wouldn't prevent it. No, false.
Wow. I was never able to escalate situation to the direct accusation of cheating. I just got my marks lowered a bit because I used methods that were "above my abilities", as my math teacher believed. Though really I thought school math was boring and tried hard to make it more interesting, less routine, less relying on memorizing things, and more clever shortcuts from general principles.
But she never accused me directly. I know her explanation for lowered marks just because my mother visited her once with a specific test results and asked why marks are so low. I wanted a direct accusation, I was trying to provoke her to doubt my methods, but either I tried too hard and she knew deep inside of her the real situation, or I needed to do something truly exceptional and failed.
Yeah, thinking about it now, I should probably try some existing and very known methods but far above the school level, something she felt herself familiar with, so she could hope to prove that I've used methods without understanding them. And then it would come to my ability to prove, that I understand my methods. Something like raising e^(ix) into n-th power, to derive a formula sin(nx) = f(sin(x), cos(x)). Though, it is might be too weird for her.
> They do not reward creativity or ingenuity.
You can stimulate yourself if you look at it as a rebellion against the system. Teenagers are good at rebelling. Though, rebellion can make matters worse. I rebelled against history trying to get the lowest marks possible. It didn't end well, and I not just didn't learn history, I've got a life-long trauma, I start to regress to my teenager mind level every time I face history.
I'm so lucky such a thing never happened to me. The closest thing was a math teacher in middle school asking me about a problem solution of mine in a test, that he had marked "mysterious" (I had to come up with my own solution path during the test because I hadn't memorized the canonical one we were taught). He asked me to explain my reasoning, and when he was satisfied that it was sound he gave me full marks for the question.