Now your 2 college diplomas. “Less than 1% of the college-age population are qualified to attend the California Institute of Technology. There are other colleges where 10, 20, 40 or 60% of the college-age population are qualified to attend...” Gardner, John W., (), Excellence, Can we be Equal and Excellent Too?, Bombay, Vakils, Feffer and Simons, 1984.
The developed countries like to pat their own back praising the quality of their educated people. Education became an end in itself in developed countries. Developed countries’ primary schools can’t keep their students longer there. But as soon as they complete it they are on their way to the next step. But once in graduate school; he or she will be held there for as long as the school needs them. The number of people finishing high school is diminishing. The higher education institution in order not to shrink try to keep students there for as a long as they can hold them.
“Graduate school became a growth industry, and the university largely became a closed system, preparing people for its own continuation and perpetuation. Drucker, P.,Toward the Next Economics, New York, Harper and Row, 1981.
“There is little evidence that jobs have become more demanding. In English-speaking Canada, for ex-ample, banks have recruited college graduates for entrance level positions for the last twenty years, and now tend to demand an additional master of business administration degree. But in French-speaking Quebec, where education revolution came quite a bit later, the same Canadian banks hire high school grad-uates for entrance positions—and these French-Canadians are no less productive, no less prepared, no less equal to demands of the job than their English-speaking colleagues to the west who have sat in school for an additional four to six years.” Drucker, P., Managing in Turbulent Times, New York, Harper & Row, 1980.
Moreover schools in more developed countries are preparing people for a market that doesn’t exist. The young person who studied for instance epidemiology in Britain had the only chance to get a job in a Third world country, where endemic diseases are. In Less developed country (LDCs) is where the jobs for epidemiologists are; but these jobs pay LDC’s salaries.
A British epidemiologist wouldn’t be willing to work in his profession in a LDC for a LDC salary. To earn a British salary working for what she has been trained, she has to join the development bureaucracy. Such as United Nations’ institu¬tions. Since there are many graduates chasing these few positions, these institutions keep raising the en¬try barriers, asking for high and higher qualifications for those positions. Graduates have to get longer school years. They overspecialize in order to get jobs. The same applies to the student of Development Economics. His job market is the World Bank, an United Nations institution or the Ministry of Overseas Development. In short: he or she would be just another development bureaucrat.
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. “As for our universities, the fragmentation of knowledge is now so complete that graduates in humanities are not expected to know any science, and science graduates are nor expected to be more than barely literate.
If the average graduate in ‘arts’ were to be transported back in time and asked about by an inquisitive Ancient Greek to explain why the sky is blue, why water is wet or glass is transparent, doubt if he or she would have much to tell.
Indeed judging from some recent experiments in the U.S. on how much university students know about laws of motion, Aristotle would be gratified to find that many of them still share his ideas! If they were also asked to outline some of the principal new ideas which science has produced in the present century or to explain in any detail the role which modern science plays in society, again I suspect that they would not have much to tell an ancient Greek. “...most science teaching seems to be aimed at training future professional scientists and is dominated by a rather narrow view of what they need to learn.”
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“Schools have largely failed to inspire in students an understanding of science and mathematics. This is true for each country with a broad educational system. After years of study, the majority of school leavers move into adult life illiterate in science and innumerate. They are equipped neither with the ap¬propriate skills, nor with the knowledge to form objective judgments. They cannot relate science and technology that dominate them with their daily lives.
They cannot cope with such key issues as the development of atomic energy, the use of non-renovable resources, chemical pollution, over-population, surplus food supplies, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons. In practice, they cannot function independently as citizens to assess alternative solutions on an informed and rational basis before making democratic choices. They are potential fodder for the dema-gogue as the move into acceptance of pseudoscience, of astrology and horoscopes, and mystique sects. Goldsmith, Maurice, 1986, The Science Critic, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. |
