Everyone’s busy with finals and whatnot, so you may have missed this little gem. Some people, this Ailee Slater being one, apparently consider the problem to be that the undergraduate degree has not yet been sufficiently devalued:

Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the University system makes absolutely no sense. Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we’re learning. The whole situation seems akin to a boss paying her employee to clean toilets and the employee turning around and telling the employer how much she is or isn’t happy with the cleaning job. If I’m paying someone to do my housekeeping, I’ll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn’t it be the same with education?

Ms. Slater has paid good money to be told that she understands things, and she expects to be told that she understands them, chop-chop. The question of whether or not this is actually the case seems to be unworthy of consideration. It all makes one wonder: why doesn’t she just go ahead and ask her housekeeper to issue her with a BA? It could scarcely be less meaningful, and the domestic help wouldn’t dare get uppity.

There’s more, much more. This plaintive theme recurs:

I pay the teacher to teach me, and then I get slapped with the label of failure if the teacher deems that I haven’t learned the correct information?

That is absolutely correct. Well done! I see this “college” thing hasn’t been a complete waste of time after all.

(See also: this editorial. Summary: You can’t expect us to work this week! We just had a four-day weekend! We have to ease back into this stuff!)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2004 at 11:29 by olly and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.