Fact is our education system is broken. We need to fix it but they won’t do anything because all they care is keeping their job, get the kids pass a class according to “their standard” and not think about the kids that pursue a college education. They only pretend to do so.

Even though I don’t use much of what I learned in school directly, I often realize that I am able to understand the details and boundaries of a problem I am attempting to solve because my knowledge has both depth and breadth.

The last phrase in your article tells us why things are the way they are, “but he or she is still required to learn higher math as a way of demonstrating an intelligence sufficient to remove an appendix”. That is true for my field. People who hire engineers from an accredited school can feel safe in the knowledge that they are hiring someone who is intelligent enough to learn difficult subjects and put forth the work it took to pass those courses. Is that a good way to judge the qualities that make a good engineer? Maybe not, but any alternative I can think of poses other problems or is just practically unworkable.

Anyone who says everyone needs the garbage that is cited in this article is a fool.

http://voices.yahoo.com/government-credentialing-gone-wild-unnecessary-degree-11486786.html?cat=9

“France and England didn’t have any wars in North America because when they got here, they united to keep the black man down.” At this point I interrupted him to mention how George Washington’s military career began in the British military, fighting the French, but he was impervious.“This was how they solved the problems of war, and managed to not bring the European wars to the New World.”

“The US Education system is the best in the world,” he proudly claimed. He backed this up by mentioning the 36,000 institutions we have. Naturally, I asked him if by “best” he meant “largest”, but nope, he honestly thought the US system is superior to the rest of the world.

He quoted someone as saying “Diversity without equity is meaningless”…and from this he concluded from this that the most important thing the US needs is “diversity at all levels”.

“Memphis, in North Africa, is the oldest city in the world,”he said…and my interrupting him again to mention that Sumeria predates Memphis by 1,000 years did no good. He followed up with “When Alexander the Great captured Memphis, he found the Great Library there, and took the knowledge back to Greece, to form the foundations of Western Civilization”.

Again, I called him on this, making certain that he really was claiming Alexander the Great captured Alexandria (a city Alexander the Great founded, and named after himself, being something of a megalomaniac). Yes, that’s what he meant, and he doubled down by saying Alexandria used to be called Memphis.

After he gave his “lesson” on history, he asked us “How many of you were familiar with this chronology?” I had to admit, I wasn’t, but I’m also not intimately familiar with other fictional timelines, like the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings histories, either.

He then finished up with “Hitler only persecuted the Jews because there were no black people in Germany”. By the end of his speech I was covering my mouth with both hands, and yes, I was sitting in the front row. Only a few of us bothered to speak up…I can’t help but be disappointed that he was even taken seriously in the slightest.

There is much, much, hatred of mathematics, but I honestly feel knew how much absolute garbage is in a college education nowadays, they’d direct that hatred to the garbage, instead of math.