10 August 2018

The Deserved Death of the Child-Centered Life

Parents let their kids run the family. Education panders to the desires of students and their despised and dismissed parent-lackeys. Governments coddle childishness for their own political ends. The immature majority lust for the irresponsibility of socialism and the lure of "free stuff" stolen from others through police-state democracy.

Disclosure:  I work for a college and make a living from tuition and state education funding.

Let's see an example that I know something about:  college education.

College tends to care too much about the student and too little about their actual training. How a person feels about their educational experience isn't germane to what college should be doing, which is inculcating a body of knowledge and practice that produces success along a specific professional path. Your professors should know more than you do about the proper way to shape you for a chosen path and a student should submit to their training. That is the relationship and the student's attitude about it is irrelevant - either conform to the training path or leave it.

The original and proper role of the college has always been training toward specialized professions. There was a need for proper physicians, lawyers, clerics, scribes, courtiers, captains, and so forth. Colleges of various stripes were conceived to train up such people. A promising person entered college, submitted to the training of professors, and (if they survived) exited as a trained professional, ready to practice. Once upon a time, if you went to the Harvard Law School with its rigorous training, you were heavily sought-after because it had a reputation for graduating excellent lawyers. That was how the institution of college was meant to function.

Sadly, college are transitioning from making students competent into encouraging incompetent and unthinking behavior for institutional profit.
Children and other immature people often make very foolish choices, typically because they ignore the counsel of wiser and more experienced people or blindly put their trust in silly, pandering, and greedy societies. Consequently, there are many, many people who really have no business being in college, yet they do it anyway with the full encouragement of everyone.  The sad fact is that colleges keep recruiting such naive people and twisting the institution into irrelevancy to try and keep such people attending, mostly for the money.

The greatest travesty is giving students a large voice in their training when they have no legitimate feedback to give other than their childish "feelings". The only useful feedback comes from successful practitioners further along the professional path that consumed the training and know if it is useful or not. The only input from a student should be which path to take, knowing that even if they only get that one choice, they will still sometimes choose the wrong path for silly reasons. Most colleges are perfectly willing to let a person make the wrong choice because it is far more interesting to extract the money that comes with a student than to help them make wise choices, often away from college attendance.  Pandering to the silly dreams and desires of children is just too profitable to be ignored (though it should be)!

Adults are supposed to prepare children for their future life as adults.  What we see far more often are old children demanding the unlimited extension of childhood while parents and other former adults simply take the easy path of abdication.  It might be seen as some sinister plot toward easy domination, but more likely, just laziness and weakness in those of greater age (but not maturity).

We cannot let children and the childish run things. They are inherently irresponsible, waste precious resources like mad, and cannot be treated with reason.  Experienced and wise adults must be in charge of things and assert their earned authority, knowing better what children really need!