Student: Teacher, why do we learn? Socrates: For life! Freire: For liberation! Dewey: For democracy! Neoliberal EduWonks: To mitigate overhead costs for employers and increase future projections of GDP! - ThreadSky

mraleosays.bsky.social • 19 days ago

Student: Teacher, why do we learn?

Socrates: For life!

Freire: For liberation!

Dewey: For democracy!

Neoliberal EduWonks: To mitigate overhead costs for employers and increase future projections of GDP!

Reposted from Trevor Aleo

It’s really absurd that we’ve reached a point where the “common sense” view of education is that its primary purpose is to lower the future onboarding/training costs for companies hiring new employees.

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davidwfortin.bsky.social•19 days ago

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/449

sashotodorov.bsky.social•19 days ago

Hot take for this website, but most people generally want the eduwonk approach for their own education. A lot of people just want to be set up so they can get a nice job and go home and care about other things.

sashotodorov.bsky.social•19 days ago

The dominance of the intelligentsia over the Discourse (tm) ignores that most people aren't part of the intelligentsia or particularly value a lot of the things the intelligentsia value. Didn't vote or "voted after only paying attention for the last 48 hours before casting my ballot) is a plurality.

sashotodorov.bsky.social•19 days ago

You can see this in how edupolicy broke reading education for decades because it decided to teach reading based on how intelligentsia kids who loved reading for its own sake learned how to read vs. what the median student needed to build up that critical skillset.

ambivalentricky.bsky.social•19 days ago

the hell are you talking about

caravaggibro.bsky.social•18 days ago

Not a lot, the only substance is the volume of characters.

agtmadcat.bsky.social•19 days ago

Right but in a good public education system they should have a bunch of civics and media literacy and critical thinking snuck into their brains while they're there for careerism.

rigbythedog.bsky.social•19 days ago

A lot of employers make you onboard yourself! Isn’t it cheaper that way already? And is onboarding routines on the state tests?

ethanprall.bsky.social•18 days ago

Idiotic

leaderannephd.bsky.social•19 days ago

Ugh.

rednecklefty.bsky.social•17 days ago

Paging NoahOpinion! 🤣

llyrkellow.bsky.social•19 days ago

In my PhD program we called it the "plug-and-play employee plan".

llyrkellow.bsky.social•19 days ago

We reached that point 45+ years ago. At a a conference a speaker told us to look at the naming of gov't ministries of education changes/time: most are now 'jobs & edu'. Look at demands & eval metrics on unis: not learning but %grads:jobs. Look at decline of corp HR training costs/time on fin. stmts.

easyeye.bsky.social•19 days ago

"One doesn't go to college for a *trade*." - my mother.

Although, her mother referred to degrees as "tickets", so it was as much about social and class mobility as self actualization and social duty.

Although, we have a lot of academics in our family, so we're not normal.

nottreysongz.bsky.social•18 days ago

This is dark! But yeah pretty accurate

kentropic.bsky.social•19 days ago

Always great to see a Paolo Freire shout-out!

carolinaina.bsky.social•19 days ago

*Paulo, just in case someone searches for him

kylerudy.com•19 days ago

The project of capitalism is to make all decisions and render all judgments through the lens of what makes rich white assholes even richer, and it 100% succeeded.

sophygurl.bsky.social•19 days ago

Also for the free babysitting (mostly because their own bosses need them at work by 9).

badatstuff.bsky.social•19 days ago

Fuck him up, Socrates

ianford.bsky.social•19 days ago

Trump: For a lifetime of subsistence backbreaking labour in the tiny screw factory! For you and your kids! And their kids. And their kids, kids!

peterreavill.bsky.social•19 days ago

Is this the same Dewey of decimal fame?

billstewart.bsky.social•19 days ago

Never thought to look it up, but this is almost certainly John Dewey,
as opposed to Melvil Dewey who designed the Dewey Decimal System in 1876

peterreavill.bsky.social•19 days ago

Thanks for checking, I didn't know there were multiple famous Dewey's. But now I do 😀

wildlee.bsky.social•17 days ago

Melvil (Mr. Decimal System) was hella regressive on education: “[Dewey] felt that everybody had a place. Some people were great men (like him) and deserved a high place. Others were not great men, and they deserved a different category of place entirely. That was why they needed to be educated

1/2

wildlee.bsky.social•17 days ago

in good, Protestant morality. Then, they would understand that Dewey and people like him were elevated men, just like Jesus was an elevated man. Of a certain class, if you will. The average factory worker needed to stop making demands for fair wages and other worthless mortal crap like that.”

2/2

blueknuckle.bsky.social•18 days ago

The original school designs (facilities and functions) for American public education were always designed to promote conditioned uniformity and productivity.

socraticreview.org•19 days ago

Why should trillion dollar companies train their employees when they can make poorly-compensated teachers do it for the ?? http://socraticreview.org/blog/2022/7/ceos-of-trillion-dollar-companies-to-schools-give-us-more-employees

mraleosays.bsky.social•19 days ago

Wow! Love that my first kinda viral Bluesky post was a snarky shot I fired off before starting dinner. Follow me on Substack I guess?

https://trevoraleo.substack.com

helchose.bsky.social•19 days ago

All true.

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