What does it mean?

This recent upload at Periscope Films is pushing college education, mostly aimed at law school and police careers. It was meant to be shown in high school classes.

Key statement: “25 years ago, only 1 out of 12 high school students went on to college. Today, 1 out of 3 go on to college. What does it mean?”

The correct answer: It means that a whole lot of people are wasting four or five years of their lives when they could have been starting to learn about life, starting to produce value, and starting to earn money.

The film gives the standard wrong answer: It means that you should waste EVEN MORE of your life by shaping your high school time toward preparing for college.

In fact the last four years of public school are wasted for many people, INCLUDING many with intellectual skills. When you’re good at something you need to be doing it as soon as you can. I’m not talking about the rare geniuses, the Mozarts and Einsteins. Most people have a dominant skill that should be developed and USED PRODUCTIVELY as soon as possible.

We don’t need to look back to medieval times for the correct answer. Before WW2, the 25 years ago of the film, most Americans were doing it the right way. Most men stopped school after 8th or 9th grade, and only 1 out of 12 went on to college. Those few people were exactly the ones whose special skills needed more pre-work experience BECAUSE THEIR MISTAKES COULD BE DANGEROUS. Doctors, lawyers, engineers.

From the other angle, schools and colleges are ALSO wasting and misdirecting their resources. Colleges have to put most of their effort into “general courses” that don’t have a focus or a goal in mind, often just preparing students for FOUR MORE YEARS of grad-school waste. And high schools are wasting their resources on College Prep instead of Job Prep or basic life skills.

Parkinson. When an organization has no clear ACHIEVABLE mission, it will turn to triviality and crime.

Nobody ever teaches basic life skills, because each stage can “safely assume” that the next stage, and then the next stage, and then the next stage, expanding into retirement, will take care of the necessary training. Instead, each stage teaches nothing in particular, and the nothing will inevitably be replaced by mischief and trouble. The time will be filled with indoctrination by the currently powerful ideology, whether religious or political or cultural.