Academic: On a pedestal it doesn’t deserve?

As jobs get more scarce young people are opting to stay in education and some universities are starting to put caps on their intake, they just don’t have enough seats.  The result of more people in tertiary education is bound to result in more people coming out with the same qualification, often a degree without an obvious career route, therefore creating even greater competition for the few jobs available.

I was recently involved in a discussion about the Technology achievement standards vs ITO (Industry Trade Organisation) unit standards in which it was suggested that one (unit standard) was lower in value to the other. Compared to what?  There is no comparison, they are very different routes.  In fact I would argue that the ITO has more long term value because it can lead to paid apprenticeship and clear pathway to employment, whereas tertiary education leads to a now common qualification and a lifetime of debt.

It is nearly 2010 and we still think that we get the most value from academia, even though both founders of Google and the founder of Microsoft dropped out of college to pursue their businesses.

It is time we stop looking from the top down to looking from the bottom up and asking ourselves, as teachers, what is the value to the individual student?  What is the point in driving them hard up a road which doesn’t suit them just because of a perception of prestige?

I happen to have a degree which I earned later in life (27) and my childhood friends who left school at age 16 now run successful businesses.  I feel that we expect so much of our young people at school that we forget that they a just kids and maybe we should allow them to enjoy it a bit more.  In the words of Jeff Jarvis author of “What Would Google Do?” – Youth is something we only get once, education is something we can do at anytime in our lives.  He is not saying we should not educate our young people rather have less emphasis on the type of academic achievement we expect.

For me the things I learned at school make up a tiny amount of the useful knowledge in my head, most of my knowledge has probably been learned in the previous 4 or 5 years of my life.  I’m not really sure what that means but I guess it has something to do with trying to stay relevant, which will no doubt get harder as I get older.