Knowledge Is Free, Education Isn't

Another way to separate the wheat from the chaff. As if the fraternity/sorority thing wasn't bad enough, appearing soon at a college near you, a two tiered educational system. So much for the illusion that attending college prepares you for a better financial future, it really does matter what your major is and it better reflect big business. Pharmacy, engineering, business and journalism (!) students are paying more for their classes at schools across the country. It's dressed up as paying for better equipment and teachers, but the end result is the same. The message is that controlling people is much more effective and financially rewarding than helping people.

“Where we have gone astray culturally,” he said, “is that we have focused almost exclusively on starting salary as an indicator of life earnings and also of the value of the particular major.”

Ah yes, one should always let a decision you made at eighteen control the rest of your life. If you won't take advice from a twenty year old because they don't have any life experience, why would you let a decision you made at the same age determine the rest of your life? And pay (borrow) more money for it?

One of the major reasons that medical care is in the state that it is, is because it became a way to make money and not help people because you wanted to. People who want to be healers, leave the professions in droves because it has been reduced to a businesslike concept with the human element all but nonexistent. The practice of medicine has been automated to the point that if you interrupt the routine by asking a question, everything screeches to a halt just like the debit card commercial. Since when did huh? become an appropriate response in a medical setting? When did the vacant look in the office staffs eyes become standard? Do you know the color of your doctor's eyes?

The wrong people have been encouraged to practice the wrong professions because of money and once again the message is being spread that one should focus on the material aspects of one's personal existence at the expense of helping others. Even if they have to charge you more. Because paying more for something makes it better, doesn't it?

Crossposted at Big Brass Blog.