Amerika

With the rise of practical realism across the West, many sacred cows are dying, and the one that is facing the biggest death is education.

When we believed everyone was equal, “education” became a magical mantra. Get some education in these people, and they will turn out alright, the wisdom went. We will teach them right from wrong, and how to do things, and then they will be just as good as the “supposedly” highly competent people who invented the methods they use.

This unleashed a nightmare maze of certification, occupational licenses, degrees and training programs. These however did not produce the desired results, but as is often the case with human best intentions, the opposite. Competence declined as it became clear that all one needed to do was sit through the classes and pass the tests, both of which were dumbed down in order to be “inclusive.”

As we watched legions of highly-educated and certified people bumble their way through decisions and make poor choices, the reaction from the population has been one of disbelief. How could something so well intended go so wrong? Education is not magic; it tests people in their ability to be good at, well, education. It is less complex than reality and rewards yes/no answers, not understanding complexity and the basis of most decisions in life, trade-offs.

Even in places like Silicon Valley, people are discovering that education and the ability to undertake test-like quiz questions has not delivered a more competent workforce, but the latter. You get bean-counters and memorizers, not thinkers. Quality plunges.

In the near future, these certifications will be fading away even faster than they are now, replaced by reliance on proven results. That in turn requires giving people a chance in entry-level jobs without certifications, which requires doing away with Affirmative Action and other programs that penalize employers for failing to hire or promote those who are from protected groups, even if they are not competent.

In fact, if the West wants to revitalize its economy, it will have to do away with Affirmative Action like programs and other means of promoting people other than by hard results. These pad the employment numbers, but make everything more expensive as five workers do the work that one once did. This in turn makes jobs boring and thankless for most people, cubicle slave McJobs with no future except benefits and repetitive, make-work labor.

This change will come about not as much through law as through an attitude shift. The West has had enough of “political”-style promotion programs that reward people for saying the right things or having the right memorized knowledge. Instead, we are looking toward people who can think independently again. With this comes a resurrection of our strength, and deprecation of the legions of qualified incompetents that we have now.

Tags: credentialism, education