College Education—America's Dream For Gold Is Turning Brown

Summary: College isn't needed for most jobs. College costs too much and has too much we don't need or want. Wikipedia lists many trades for which training costs less, takes less time and has a higher likelihood for a job.

Instead of four years of college, four of medical school and four of specialty training, if I were doing it over, I might do a 2-year RN and a year of anesthesia as a friend in college did. Nurse anesthetists do the same jobs that MD anesthesiologists do, usually in rural areas and pay may be less, but a saving of about six years time and tuition. Such openings may not be as plentiful now, but it's a good example.

Walter Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, cites "The U.S. Labor Dept... the majority of new American jobs over the next decade do not need a college degree. We have a six-digit number of college-educated janitors in the U.S."

Ohio University's Vedder adds that there are "one-third of a million waiters and waitresses with college degress." More than one- third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, taxi drivers and salesmen.

We've been deceived into thinking that a college degree prepares us for a high paying job when, in most cases, it isn't so. Google “100 entrepreneurs who succeeded without college” for an example. Among the best paid are good sales people, and there are many trades allowing a choice to suit one's temperament.

The most practical course I took in high school was typing. High school had most of what I needed and much I didn't need. College was more of the same non-essentials. Literature courses are mostly fiction and like TV, offer an array of erotica that spells trouble for youth under social pressure to experience everything before marriage, only to discover how different life is after marriage.

We would do well to turn the clock back a century or so to when parents taught their children as in Bible times. Men taught a trade to their sons and young ladies learned the art of cooking and home-making from mother. “You shall teach them...” is biblical wisdom that made a strong nation long before public schools became a disaster with their focus on sex education.

To consider homeschooling, one may need to move to the country to escape government tyranny of taking your child and stripping him or her of values and faith in the Bible while programming them to accept a New World Order that calls nothing sin and where everything is allowed except protest.

Dr. Florence Stratemeyer, Professor of Education at Columbia University's Teacher College reviewed a favorite book on education by Ellen White. Stratemeyer was amazed at White's title, Education. She saw its balanced curriculum as addressing the whole person, body, mind and spirit, saying the world was in desperate need of a moral component in education. Writing in the 1950's, she said it was 50 years ahead of her time, but now it's a century ahead and a good text for homeschooling!

Readers may access it and scan its contents online at http://www.whiteestate.org/books/ed/ed.asp Merry Christmas to homeschoolers and to all seeking a better understanding of true education!