Reply #38: like you said, it's not even information, it's certification

[hfojvt]

The certificate which is your pass to a good-paying job. Consequently, most 'students' don't really care about information, or knowledge. Don't care about literature or music, just need this class to graduate. Don't care about economics or history, just need this class to graduate.

And they are right too. Most of the things I learned in college are useless in my life. Even the good-paying job I got, with our government wanting to use my brain to help develop weapons of mass destruction - better and more destructive ones, that is. Even they did not use what I was taught in school. Instead I had to learn new programming languages on the job.

It runs all through school though, we motivate our kids through fear. Learn this, or memorize it really, or you will flunk. If you flunk, you will lose all your friends and be known as a loser, a moran. If you do not finish school, you will end up working as a janitor or at some other really dangerous, boring, low-paying, low-status job. Kids are born wanting to learn and explore. You can hardly stop them as they learn to walk and talk, and grab everything in their reach. Instead of assisting that or guiding it, our society feels like it must break it. Drill them and regiment them so they will be ready for a lifetime of doing the same mundane task on an assembly line over and over and over again for the rest of their lives.