the fact that community colleges are seen as less valid and for “stupid” people is a result of classism and in this essay I will-
ppl in the tags saying that it’s “genuinely a lesser tier of education because people go there for trades and nursing and thats about it” are just proving that its classism. bc a) no thats absolutely not correct. a good chunk of people that go to community colleges do so to knock out their gen eds at a lower price than they’d be if they went to a four year, then transfer to a four year. and more importantly b) trade professions are not lesser than other professions that take higher degrees. people who go into things that take associates degrees are not “stupid”.
if you think ppl who are too poor to attend a four year university for all four years, or that ppl who are too poor to/don’t want to get their bachelor’s/master’s/doctorate are “stupid” then i have news for you:
as someone with a bachelor’s degree in english, i am inexpressibly tired of people telling me to get highly specific jobs that often require highly specific degrees. “just go write for a magazine!” you need a journalism degree for that. “just teach!” you need a teaching certificate, and also fuck you. “just go work at a tutoring place!” tutoring children with learning disabilities, which make up the majority of the clientele at those places, requires not only a teaching certificate but a specialized master’s degree. “just go work at a library!” you need a master’s degree in library science to be a librarian. it is actually a highly skilled and extremely competitive field. you don’t just “go work at a library,” you train for years in the vain hope that you will get one of handful of available jobs. “just go work at a library.” the nerve. the unmitigated gall. “just go work at a library.” ugh.
alright listen up. i had no idea this was going to be the most popular post i ever made, and i’ve gotten some really nice comments and some pretty condescending ones. let’s get a few things straight:
first, this post is based on MY experiences and MY research in MY geographical area. i don’t know if it really is any different in big cities, small towns or elsewhere in the world, but where i live this is how it is.
second, this post is not about my burning desire to work in a library. i honestly don’t want to, it’s just something that’s been recommended to me ad nauseam.
thirdly, i don’t KNOW what you can do with an english degree. if i knew that, would i be having all these jobs recommended to me? i don’t have a job! i haven’t figured out what i’m doing with my life! i don’t KNOW!
and finally, several people have expressed their confusion about why i or anyone would get an english degree if there are no jobs for it, and i find these comments to be especially tedious.
i. was. told. there. would. be. jobs.
english is the only thing i’ve ever been good at, so i knew that’s what i wanted to study. it was my passion, and i was assured that following your passions was what college was about. i went to a meeting for prospective english majors freshman year and the head of the department told us all that he was constantly getting requests from employers who would tell him “send me all your english majors!” he told us if we majored in english we’d have the critical thinking skills to do whatever we liked. we’d be in impossibly high demand.
these were all, as i have found out, baldfaced lies. BUT, not in the way you think.
it’s true, english majors are not in as high demand as the department head led us to believe. but you know who is in incredibly high demand? NO ONE! there is no major that makes you imminently employable, not a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree or a doctorate. you are equally unemployable with a business degree, or a law degree, or a degree in marine biology. you could have a degree in any STEM field and you’d still struggle to find a job. the only difference between those degrees and an english degree is where you’re told to “just get a job doing x.”
we are in an employer’s market right now. there are more people than there are jobs to be had, partly because none of the baby boomers will fucking retire, but also because of all the people who have to work two jobs to make ends meet because nowhere pays a living wage anymore. no one is safe, nothing is sacred, and if you think “well if you’d only gotten a different degree this wouldn’t be happening lol” then you need to pull your head out of your ass and look around you my friend. this is not a result of our poor choices. we did not do this to ourselves. it was done to us, by the ivory tower shit-heads who line their pockets with our student loan money.
tldr: major in english. eat the rich.
I have no idea if you’ve heard this before, so sorry if you have, but proofreading, especially academic proofreading, is a job that you can get with an english degree. It’s what I’m doing currently, proofreading engineering journals.
yeah, yeah, i know, academia is an evil bourgeois lair of useless elitist white cishet men writing self-congratulatory articles about nothing and groping their brilliant female students’ arses and so on and so forth, but occasionally, it is prudent to let some of those useless academics – plenty of whom are women and/or poc and/or lgbt nowadays, how shocking, and who’ve spent their lives learning EVERYTHING about a certain subject – explain a text or a concept to you, so that you don’t run around after with a wildly inaccurate understanding of smth like what ‘social construct’ means, or what Nietzsche was all about, or what Freud actually wrote or did or said, or inventing already invented strains of feminism, etc etc etc
oh, and while i’m at it – this whole “academia is useless” is a belief that the far-right ideology has been extremely fond of all throughout the last century or so. just saying.
yeah, yeah, i know, academia is an evil bourgeois lair of useless elitist white cishet men writing self-congratulatory articles about nothing and groping their brilliant female students’ arses and so on and so forth, but occasionally, it is prudent to let some of those useless academics – plenty of whom are women and/or poc and/or lgbt nowadays, how shocking, and who’ve spent their lives learning EVERYTHING about a certain subject – explain a text or a concept to you, so that you don’t run around after with a wildly inaccurate understanding of smth like what ‘social construct’ means, or what Nietzsche was all about, or what Freud actually wrote or did or said, or inventing already invented strains of feminism, etc etc etc
oh, and while i’m at it – this whole “academia is useless” is a belief that the far-right ideology has been extremely fond of all throughout the last century or so. just saying.
Not to mention the fact that Mrs. White isn’t qualified to teach.
She should be required to take a remedial English course.
“I have went”? please. It’s “I have gone”, Mrs. White.
first, my kid would not sign anything without me seeing it first. 2nd, upon seeing it i would be at the superintendant’s office the next morning.
then we would speak to the teacher.
black folk gotta nip it in the bud.
Dont let your children be controlled like this. I remember back when I was in school my mom always told me “if you really need to use the bathroom or attend to an emergency and the teacher won’t let you, then just leave the classroom and I’ll deal with teacher and principle”
Mom had my back
If I was this kid I would use up those passes and then just fuckin’ throw up or get a severe nosebleed in the classroom and then refuse to leave because “sorry, I can’t go to the nurse, I already used up my two passes for the fucking MONTH”
There was a student at my high school, who we will call John Doe, who actually did that. When teachers gave him a limited number of bathroom allowances (usually 3 per semester, which was the standard at my school), he would use them in the first week, and then induce vomitting my eating rotten food he found around the school garbage cans. If teachers refused to let him go, he would just throw up on something they had to touch. Light switches, keyboards, whatever was available.
Instead of making admin do anything about this toxic policy, they just doubled down harder, to the extent that one girl politely informed a teacher that she felt like she might be about to have a seizure and could she go to the nurse, please. She was denied, sat back down at her desk, and promptly passed out and concussed herself on the concrete floor when she fell.
Another girl had severe vertigo-induced fainting, could not get a teacher to excuse her from a phys ed class, and fell off a monkey bars and split her head open, and nearly lost an eye because her glasses broke when she landed.
A student with, I believe, diabetes had a severe blood sugar drop and tried to eat a candy bar in a class with a “no food or drinks” rule. The candy bar was taken away, and she had to be taken out by EMTs.
This kind of human rights abuse in public schools is not new. I graduated a full decade ago.
I’m glad it’s being publically discussed again, (briefly around 2003-2005 this was also a popular subject of discussion). I hope that this time, concrete changes in policy are actually affected.
public school is child abuse
everything about it is like this
don’t agitate to change the policies, just abolish it
No, that is a terrible idea. Public school should be changed and overhauled heavily, but if it’s abolished, there’s two things remaining:
1. homeschool (not all parents can do this, a lot of households have two parents who both work at least one job)
2. private school (which costs money and then you’re locking poor/not middle class enough people out of education)
Also, if you think neither of those have/have had abuse within them, you’re wrong.
Explain again how internet is a frilly, uneeded thing and not a basic utility?
The only upside to this is that, by not having snow days, school gets out sooner in the summer. But on the other hand, it assumes everyone has internet and that the internet won’t fail during a blizzard. Which does happen.
It’s almost as if schools push and ideology that benefits schools.
Bruh, trades are in high fucking demand right now too. Between now and 2020 there are suppose to be 300,000 more jobs and that’s just for welder.
Shit, they’ll pay for you to learn how to do it.
I just finished high school and got a untility job in a factory and I have almost no experience. They’re gonna train me for everything plus it has full health benefits.
Trades are fucking great.
My husband is a welder, and is very very good at it. He got hired by a locksmith company pretty much just by walking in and going “Yes I can weld.”
All of the other guys there were great at locksmithing, but none of them were trained welders, and they needed someone who could build custom doors and frames.
They trained him to do lock stuff too, so now he can weld AND pick locks.
The owner of the company, when he handed out Christmas bonuses, looked at him and went “Dude we literally cannot fire you because we’d be screwed so here’s your bonus and also we’re giving you a raise.”
Welders are in desperate demand.
Blows kisses to this post.
Anyway, learn a trade, unionize, wear your PPE, memorize OSHA’s phone number.
Ultimately, do what you want most. Be sure to research trades before you just go to college for the sake of going to college, but don’t act like college is useless, either. Reform is necessary, yes, but unless people push for that reform, college will go back to being only for upper class people, which is a bad idea. So yeah. Research all your post-secondary options.
adults, while forcing all children above the age of 5 to sit still, be silent, and obey orders for 7-8 hours a day with minimal breaks, reducing their exposure to fresh air and sunlight to almost nothing, forcing them to alter their natural sleeping patterns to increase productivity, and repeatedly telling them their self worth depends on their being able to follow these instructions perfectly for 13 or more years: kids these days are so lazy! they never go outside! they never want to do anything! clearly it’s not because of us!
It is honestly so heartbreaking to see how many conversations in the notes are comparing who gets 30 minutes for lunch
and an afternoon or two off or no homework until they’re 12 years old.. as if that in ANY way compares to being able to run out in the sun whenever you feel like it and sleep as much as you need in your own rhythm and be in control of what your day looks like and who you spend it with and not being subjected to an environment that is designed to train discipline.
Experiencing true autonomy and freedom isn’t being able to go to the bathroom without asking, or having wednesday afternoons off. Slightly ‘better’ school systems are still designed to acclimatise kids to the drudgery of wage labour.
But as the state of freedom for children described above has basically never existed ever, I really don’t see what the fuss is about.
I mean, prior to “the school system training them for wage labour” they typically started DOING wage labour as young as 8 – 12, or would be doing farm chores from, like 5. So… you know…
If i get one more fucking “do farm chores” comment on this im gonna lose it
Read the original post. Youre defending children being forced indoors all day by saying “well what if they had to work outdoors! Wouldnt that be bad!!”
Ask any fucking kid, theyd LOVE to be working outside with animals and plants and learning at their own pace and eating full meals that they grew themselves and playing outside, but thats literally AGAINST THE LAW because they have to spend their formitave years locked in government institutions that are literally just underfunded juvenile prisons. Learn critical thinking skills. Go to the schools youre all so fond of.
What do you think life in medieval Europe was like for children. That’s what I was referring to. I mean, I didn’t think I had to spell it out, but apparently I do.
The current school system may be 15 flavours of fucked up. It definitely is. I’m not saying its not. I’m just saying its better than maybe if you’re lucky being taught to read and do some basic sums before being dumped into hours and hours of daily repetitive labour. Sure working outside is great, but autonomy never entered into it. Sleeping as long as you like? Sure, if you really really like getting up at dawn.
So, because the school system has problems, child labor is AOK? Like, that’s what you’re saying @colacharm. Kids needing to be outside more is not the same as the “good old days” of working dawn to dusk on a farm or working in a coal mine or mill or ect. There’s a long, storied history behind the laws that dictate the ages kids go to school. Removing them will not lead to “learning at their own pace and eating full meals that they grew themselves and playing outside”
Ok, I know a lot of people did not have positive experiences with the American educational system. But I do wish people would acknowledge that that amount of people is not %100. I did well in my schools and less structured types of schooling would not work for me. Maybe I got really, really lucky, but I doubt it.
anyway, since the average life expectancy is close to a three digit number now, can we stop forcing adolescents to decide their life long field of study at the tender age of 17 or so
As long as there’s acknowledgement that some 17/18 year olds want to go to college. Flexibility is the key here.
lookashiny 