...the counterargument is that college's purpose is not to prepare you for a job, but to teach you how to actually think, how to take an idea apart and poke the squishy bits until they stop being squishy. (and incidentally to fulfill the whole ancient tribal bit of suddenly dumping a whole lot of independence on your kid and seeing what happens.)

The tradeskill argument is a fine one, *if* you think that your average kid knows what he/she wants to do with their life that early. The US system ends up giving kids a whole bunch of information they'll never need to know, but they think it'll be nice for them to have some understanding of. I find history interesting, but I don't think it's critical knowledge. I find biology fascinating (hell, I'm a bio major) but your average kid is never going to need to know about it. Calculus? Hell no. Basic algebra's probably as far as anyone needs to ever go. English classes... well... half of me says they can be safely discarded, and the other half says that you need to give them some kind of immersion in what culture is.

Homeschooling ideas... well, the problem is that then you don't have that most critical of things, the lunch/recess complex. At the risk of quoting South Park, you can't teach social skills in homeschooling.

On a quasi-irrelevant note, though: Yeah, possibly the most pathetic thing at my beloved Northwestern University are the journalism majors. I'm sorry, guys, but you will learn JACK without actual journalism experience, no matter how 'immersive' the course is.

Also, since all high school does anymore is prepare you for college, and NOT prepare you for the working world, then we've all got sucsessful careers as squishy thing pokers ahead of us, don't we?

I'm inclined to agree with the 'college= teh suck' reasoning. I plan on never darkening the doorsteps of any university, and moving up in my company regardless.

What's with all the railing on scheduled education, too? Let's face it; home schooling wouldn't work without supervision. And supervision would thusly make it the same as a "formal" education. The reason it wouldn't work is every parent with kids would basically be forced to teach them at least 8 months out of the year, and many of them either can't be bothered or have to work to support the families.

Let's not forget the inherent want for freedom that children exhibit. It would be a lot more difficult to make a kid behave if he were at home rather than in a school with authority figures and "the principal".

As far as making colleges free, they never will be. The only way that's going to 'happen' is if governments entirely fund colleges, which then comes back as taxes anyways, negating the savings really. I do believe they should be less expensive, as they are nothing short of extoritionist now, but I do also believe that one has to be reasonable. Doing away with formal education, even revamping it entirely, whatever, isn't practical. It quite frankly won't work, it's too drastic. There's too much left up to chance. In the society most countries in the world now experience there's too much in the way for an unstructured learning environment.

I do rather like the "do away with the myth of a college degree" thing though. A piece of paper rarely makes someone more qualified for something unless it's a medical practice, if you ask me.

Of course home schooling wouldn't work without supervision, but parents are supposed to supervise their kids anyway. And newer technologies are making homeschooling easier on working parents through internet-based curriculums. Essentially, you're taking the "go to this place for 8 hours and sit there" aspect out of the equation and the kids are learning everything through their homework. I know families that use this method and it's very effective.

As to the argument that you can't learn social skills in homeschooling, that's a load of crap. If parents actually took the time to get their kids involved in other activities outside the house with kids their own age, then they would learn plenty of social skills. Honestly, what sort of behavior does one learn in high school. As someone who was on every extreme of the social spectrum in his high school experience, I can assure you that anything one would learn in that arena in a public school setting is complete garbage. As ridiculously as it was portrayed, "Heathers" actually isn't that far off from a real life high school experience.

And finally, I'm of the opinion that you SHOULD go to college, as we in the US of A have determinded that it is the only part of your education that matters. My argument is that it should be publicly funded, the necessary money being taken away from the archaic K-12 system that earns you the educational background to ask such daring questions as, "Would you like fries with that?"

I didn't say anything about social skills, yo. Just for reference. Society does not mean social skills.

Also imagine the deadbeat parents? The people who don't have internet yet? I'm not trying to take you down, just an undertaking of this enormity would be vastly more expensive than the current system and we probably wouldn't see benefits on a wide scale for a long time. Maybe the K-12 system is archaic but in my opinion it would be better to update that somehow rather than trust homeschooling. Most families have to have both parents working these days which leaves nobody to supervise the schooling, and when there's nobody supervising you (I say this as I, too, was a kid once) a small child is much more likely to play trucks and G.I. Joes than bury his nose in a textbook.

Actually, the social skills thing wasn't in response to you, Shiney. Other people had brought it up. Xal, most notably.

And it's a lot cheaper to fund computers and internet for families than it is to build schools and employ people to work in them. The inherant problem in this, of course, is that a lot of elementary, middle, and high school teachers would find themselves out of work, but what's to stop them from becoming college professors? Or private school teachers, for that matter. Clearly, the majority of public school teachers aren't getting it done (be it for any reasons, many of which are no fault of theirs). Until recently, I lived in a town in California called Redding, where at the local community college, the bulk of students were having to be taught how to read before they could even move on to the college level curriculum. Don't get me wrong, Redding is not exactly populated with America's best and brightest, but if you come out of 13 grades of public school without having learned something as basic as literacy, then there is clearly something wrong with the system. If there is a way to upgrade and imporve our current system, I'm all for it, but so far nobody's been able to come up with and implement a way to do it. Bush has his "No Child Left Behind" Act, which is at least an idea, but then they cut the funding out from under it and made it completely useless. Regardless of the solution, a near-complete overhaul is in order. I'm just looking at it as I would were I to have kids, and I wouldn't trust the current system as far as I could throw it.

http://www.back2college.com/library/faq.htm

Nope. It's still a good idea to go to college. You can command a decent salary and benefits. Benefits are more and more important these days because social security and all that jazz is going down the toilet. You want to be secure in a profitable job that will take care of you and your family (should you have one) when you have medical issues. If you don't get a college degree you are basically enlisting yourself to a life of wage-slavery. Of course there are exceptions and there are people who have made more money than a small country's GDP, but they are few and far between.

I look at a college degree as an insurance policy, more than anything. I am not sure if I even want to use my degree when I graduate, but I will always have it. Even if I don't enter my particular field, having a B.A. will open up a lot of opportunities to work for the government and/or military. You can do more as a college graduate.

As for whether "brand-name" schools are better than community schools, I really can't say. I go to a state university and I would rate it as better than average, but what do I have to compare it to?

I never said that it didn't. Or maybe I did, but that was not what I intended. Here's the thing, a job is surpossed to make you a functional member of society. With everyone working together, we get great things accomplished by working together. For a lot of jobs, even though it doesn't seem like it, learning how to think is very important.

So in other words, learning to think means your qualified for a lot of jobs. And jobs make the world go round. So you need to learn to think to make the world go round.

HOWEVER, some people already know how to think. These people are still required to go to college to be 'certified' for the job. There's the rub, sometimes college is unnecesary and we make it necesary.

And I don't think I said don't go to college.

To which I have to add another detail. College provides you with resources to learn, most importantly a proffesseur, who directs you on how to think and go about your subject. Keep in mind that he is not a teacher, but a director.

Oh, and a college proffesseur can be talked to if you don't go to that college, so colleges are shouldn't be necesary, but they are. That was what I tried, and failed, to get across last time.

Brand-name schools have better professors. Although usually good professors are bad teachers, so there may be truth in the article.

Also, a teacher is someone who, well, teaches you things. He teaches the brunt of material and gives you hard information. However, a professeur is surposed to refine the way you think, but the trick is you should already know the information. Also based on his expertise he evaluates you and your thinking. And your knowledge. A very fine line, and I find it hard to convey the difference at the moment. Note that this is the definition I use. I really don't care about real world definitions of this at the moment.

The generalizations and general lack of proof behind your broadly vitriolic statements cause me a mixture of rage and pity. I would say that your lack of a college education is blatantly apparent, but I have met too many intelligent people who do not have one. If I said "your vaguely paranoid, overreaching, and outright incorrect post is a result of your refusal to open your ridiculously closed mind and LEARN something at college", that would be a generalization. For emphasis, generalizations are BAD! On the other hand, you do have a ridiculously closed mind, and your post does fit the description, yet I suspect a deeper reason than "no college" for the imbecilic and pueric quality of this post.

Easy there, Drangonsbane.

Adamark brings up a good point, however the 'safety' of a college degree is based at least in part on the misconception that said degree ensures proper skill level and 'deservedness' of benefits for any job in question.

It's like paying the mob for 'protection' that you didn't need in the first place.

Excepting extremely senstive fields, like the medical field, or scientific research, IMO there's almost no job you can't "succeed" (re: do well) at if you applied yourself to your primary education. I think people underestimate grasping math and reading well - screw the buisness degree if they can't add or talk in front of a group, eh?