[MrB]

Every young man would be better off learning some “skills” than he would going to college this fall.

With the “shift” that’s coming,
growing your own food is going to be much more valuable than most of the degree offerings and the “high level indoctrination centers” these days.

[Lexinom]

The substrate for a fundamental and historical transformation in education exists. With the taxonomic and hierarchical organization of knowledge now available to anyone for free, the days of the importance of the traditional (and expensive) university and the paper degree are in fact quite numbered. Electronic certification for competency in a given subject matter? Free - to anyone willing to put forth the rigor necessary to learn the material and earn it. Paper degrees that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and leave families subject to harassment by subhuman bill collectors will be a thing of the past.

Combine

• 1) the crushing cost of traditional eduction, which filters out otherwise quite talented and capable students;
• 2) the built-in bias/indoctrination that lards traditional education; and
• 3) the ubiquity of free, open-source, copyleft information

and you can see a perfect storm on the horizon.

As this new paradigm gains ascendancy, and with its high degree of specialization determined by the learner (as opposed to cookie-cutter education), and with business owners themselves taking a structured autodidactic approach to learning and therefore preferring it in their colleagues/employees, the traditional university will fade into a more limited and specialized role.

It will, for many of us, be a most welcomed day, a day of true equal opportunity, a day that demarcates the end of the Ivy League hegemony - a day when merit is determined by objective knowledge. For some, of course, the day will not be so welcomed because they will be expected to demonstrate skill now, today, rather than point to a piece of paper earned 20 years ago. For all, it will be wonderful as it will raise overall competition and productivity.

Then - when America jettisons the traditional pedagogic paradigms in favor of one which leverages the advantages of the 21st Century - we can push toward restoring American exceptionalism in the world.