Education 2.0 & 3.0

“We need more welders and less philosophers,” said Marco Rubio. A Cuban-American lawyer from Miami, he ran in the Republican presidential primaries this year but had to settle for a return to the U.S. senate last week.

Rubio has no known prejudice against philosophers. He was just one more among many politicians appealing to voters who believe education should be clearly practical and focussed on the job market. He favours vocational study. “I don’t know why we stigmatize vocational education,” he said. “Welders make more money than philosophers.”

Summary from Academica Top Ten - Wednesday, November 16, 2016

"When politicians lose faith in the humanities 

“In the last decade or so, governments have been edging away from philosophy and all the other subjects that we cluster under the term ‘humanities,’” writes Robert Fulford for the National Post. The author argues that while an English literature department would have been considered the core of a university only one or two generations ago, current governments are far more likely to subsidize science, math, engineering, and other courses that are supposed to promise better job prospects and do more to stimulate the economy. Today, writes Fulford, “universities have become a site for a bitter struggle between no-nonsense job training and the grander possibilities of the imagination.” Part of this struggle, he notes, is the widespread unwillingness to recognize that “citizens cannot relate well to the world around them by factual knowledge and logic alone.”"