Originally Posted by Eric the Green

I agree (as a boomer). I notice talk about holding colleges accountable for the "success" of their education by giving students info on how much money other students make after graduating. What counts in education now is only how successful people are economically as a result of their education. One pundit I heard said, however, that philosophy students do well because they go into various professional fields.

I learned the bulk of my philosophy after graduating from college. I just wish that I had studied philosophy in college and gotten to discuss the basic realities of life with my peers. Hick town? XXXX County is just so special... sentimentality is a great virtue... money and bureaucratic power make the ultimate reality... thinking outside the box makes one a circus freak.

I know. Most people are intellectually lazy. They would rather watch TV than read books. Even if they read books they are romance novels or adventure yarns if fiction.... and often something that offers a chance of getting rich. The huge number of people who patronize gambling casinos demonstrates that people are mathematically and economically illiterate.

Also, Marco Rubio's idea that education should happen online (in places like Udacity) to save money is getting traction. I certainly wanted a lot more from college life than sitting and studying at a computer. But today, many people have no such idea about what going to college means. Young people today are impoverished about their outlook on what life is all about, probably because economic limits and pressures are so much greater now.

College used to be much more affordable because (1) it was more spartan, (2) the college teachers were typically experts in a narrow field, (3) colleges did not have the bloated bureaucracies that they now have, and (4) colleges did not offer so much choice. In general intellectual sophistication in 1900 would be intellectual sophistication today.

The right wing goal of making people work all the time, and thus cutting off their interests in anything else conservatives find subversive, by cutting social programs and wages, seems to have worked for quite some time now.

If they could get away with it, the elites would commit most of us to working to exhaustion, physical or mental, even if most of the work were devoid of productive value. Leisure is OK if people watch Trash TV or connect to porn. But if they question the reality of the Universe, then the vapidness of the values of the economic elites becomes obvious.

In view of the technologies that we now have, most of us can produce more in six hours than we did in the 1930s in eight -- when the eight-hour day became the norm.