educational pursuits are tied to an old industrial world. To get back what most of us remember would require huge investments in training, infrastructure, factories, etc, just to replay the last few years. But throughout those years we profited by inflating our money and taking on debt to live, selling our jobs and industry. What would be the point in regaining that? We haven't been productive enough to live on our output for decades. The resulting wages wouldn't leave enough to even buy on credit what we used to.
The old world is gone, and it's time to get on with creating the new one. That should occupy us for the next 100 years or so. Create some new technologies and ways of doing things, find ways to help people thrive, create opportunity that most people would probably grab up in a heartbeat. (My interests lie in adult and community education, btw).
It would take thousands, maybe tens of thousands of artists to really do this right. And a couple of engineers to make the impossible work. But I doubt we will reach the ideal.
Today we are educating the engineers (or whomever), and cutting the art programs, graduating people out of sheer inertia, with no place for them to go, at least in this country. Now our student loan debt is about a trillion, 270 billion over 30 days past due, 10% bad.
Doesn't seem like a good plan. Probably should expand the art and humanities programs and make them mandatory for engineers and finance majors. Could be dangerous, but I bet it would be productive,
So let's do something different. Maybe a huge influx of cheap vo-tech schools modeled after the old Foster-Estes system in Oklahoma, not the yuppiefied version they have now. People could learn how to create and do things, start business, learn accounting, maybe some science, math, collaborate, co-op with each other to create something new. $1 an hour or a monthly pass for $100, with some work study funded by spin off co-op businesses. Let the community figure out what they need, bottom up. These people are adults, they don't need handholding.(There are those doing biological research and working with DNA in their freakin' closets, surely we can accomplish the same things on the necessary scale in our communities. I think it would be a hoot to compete with the local accredited state colleges, and maybe make the for-profits redundant relics like they should be.
Maybe we fund community college-level learning centers where people could create a humanities program that makes sense to them, but leaves them actually MORE likely to read history when they leave. Use the Internet and cable as seamlessly as classrooms. (If anyone thinks that is too hard, there are some junior high and senior high kids, and a few dropouts, that would implement it for you, I bet. For a small fee). You could build underground like OKC Community College (that Oklahoma, it actually was a very progressive state at one time - you could get shot at for trying to campaign as a Republican down by the North Canadian river).
And we need to be thinking about how 10,000 people turning 65 every day now, many with 10 or 20 more decent years left, are going to affect our demographics. They were 10% of the population, within a few decades may be as much as 25%, along with increasing costs and inability to make a living in our old industrial world. Many won't have the resources to even live, given that we may not see full employment until the middle of the next decade, much at lower pay rates than in the past, so not as much to run a government on.
We may NEED for them to be productive, but at what kind of future-oriented job? Walmart can only use so many greeters, and we still need a tax base to sustain the edifice we have built, yet they are being followed by a generation of people who, on the whole, will make less than their parents did with no solution in sight.
Maybe we need to change the concept of senior centers from poker and ping pong to work centers and ...?
We have had a number of "free" universities in the past, the 92nd street Y is an outgrowth of that. Maybe we need something like those again. They weren't "free" of costs, though they were minimal, but free of soul-strangling administration.
(The story goes that a university back East, since we had no doctorates at the beginning of this country, got together and awarded one to a board member, who promptly awarded doctorates to the rest of the board. If Harvard can start like that, I am sure we can do just as fine a job).
There's lots that could be tried. Some of it left from behind unfinished project of the 1970's...
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