Education as Work

The two articles linked below nicely formalize my questions. What does education have to do with schooling, certification, and work?

Peter Drucker:

“Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. It’s as large a change as when we first got the printed book.

“Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? And for the middle-class family, college education for their children is as much of a necessity as is medical care—without it the kids have no future.

“Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis.”

Crisis means that things will get either much better or much worse. Things will get much different, Drucker says.

Why education is productive — a parable of men and beasts

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/02/why_education_i.html

Will the University Survive?

http://www.mises.org/story/2013

This one is just for the test of truth in humor it presents, from The Onion, just so you have a clue from the start:

University Implicated In Checks-For-Degrees Scheme

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30632

New to me is a distiction of signaling and certification. Here’s a simple thought experiment to illustrate. Which would do more for your career: A Princeton education, but no diploma, or a Princeton diploma, but no education?

What part of work don’t you understand?

You’ll find a well written article by a professor taking a position on a number of issues by banning laptops from his classroom here:

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i27/27b00701.htm

I traded movies for video then went to hands-on laboratory and eventually embraced project learning during my teaching career adjusting to a quickly changing public school student population. While I opened computer labs and enjoyed the environment, the isolated students I observed in darkened college dormatory rooms  years later playing a another just accross the hall was the last stage in my career observations. I now enjoy the unanticipated luxury of taking a college level course from home for free. Work, play, hard, easy, enjoyable, I don’t understand.

Maybe flying cars are off the table but the leisure society is a reality?

Working to this Point

What you’ll find if you go for more……

There is five years worth of links to articles, essays, editorials, etc. on the general subject of work and working.  It is the best of what I browsed through in my day-to-day web travels and thought interesting enough to collect.