An article here about the crisis in youth unemployment in South Africa. Youth unemployment is high and growing and the large numbers of young people degrees or without technical degrees is discussed. From the article:
She argued that the private sector should rather think ‘‘out of the box’’ and focus less on degrees and diplomas. ‘‘The fact that you cannot present a diploma does not mean you don’t have anything to offer. On the contrary, there are countless examples of South Africans who do not have a doctorate or high school diploma but who are very successful,’’ she added.
This is the factory-model education system, culling out citizens to keep salaries high and wasting manpower and labor in the process. We have lived with this education model long enough to now assume the goal is to tweak the model rather than question the validity of a system that doesn't provide greater democracy, decentralization, and respect for diversity of human beings. Human beings come in a wide variety of types and that diversity should prove a source of strength, creativity and should make our lives better. Except that our educational systems, based on factory and corporate models and designed to preserve the status quo, do not actually view human beings as a resource.
Educational systems work by elimination rather than inclusion. The entire system is designed to over-organize to provide jobs and then to eliminate slowly and steadily in many complicated ways such that those who are eliminated spend enormous amounts of time in the process. It is a failure creation system where none existed prior to the system itself defining these successes (some) and failures (most).
One wonders if South Africa, or the US, has a program for increasing the number of farmers, something we all really need.
No comments:
Post a Comment