“The computer business is exclusively the work of school dropouts…”

—John Taylor Gatto, who then goes on to list every single luminary in the computer business…and tells us when each luminary dropped out.

John Taylor Gatto is, or should be, a national treasure. He won many teaching awards, but then walked away from the profession when he realized that teaching in the public schools was a profession that hurts children. Most everything he wrote about concerned public education of children, but what he has to say is often relevant to higher education.

I’ve linked to a very brief talk of his. It begins with the above, pointing out that the entirety of the computer business today comes from people who dropped out of school.

I’ve discussed before how completely bogus “computer science” degrees are in our college and university system, and why. If you want to gain marketable, useful, computer skills, you should run away from our rip-off accredited schools that teach nothing (for tens of thousands of dollars a year in loans you’ll owe forever because you won’t learn employable skills), and instead go to unaccredited schools that teach real skills (and if you can’t get employed after graduating from the legitimate unaccredited school, you owe nothing; please understand that accreditation is a seal of illegitimacy nowadays).

Higher education’s gross incompetence here is no surprise for regular readers of my blog. A natural defense to the ineptitude of computer training would be “But computers are evolving so fast, our huge and sluggish higher education system can’t keep up.”

It’s a good defense, and frankly, I believe our thousand year old system should be a little slow to adapt to a flavor-of-the-month topic (although it sure hasn’t slowed the embrasure of gender studies and diversity). That is not the issue here.

“When you move to the fast food business…every founder of every fast food franchise was [a dropout]”

–Gatto, again. Of course, and again he backs up his claim.

Now we’re talking fast food, an industry where high school and elementary school dropouts laid all the foundations. Fast food, business, hasn’t changed much at all in decades…why can’t higher education even copy the ideas of those who came before (a core idea of the university!), and produce *someone* just as capable and insightful as a high school dropout?

We tell our kids to go to college to learn something to give them a better life. Our Poo Bahs in higher education jack up tuition to astronomical heights because they insist higher education is so valuable…but where are the empirical results?

I think education is valuable, but I see no need to indebt another human being forever to get it.

“Let’s get into show business…”

–Gatto, pointing out a very lucrative career that, again, has few college graduates. Degrees in theatre, are, of course, worth nothing.

If we’re going to charge insane amounts of money for college courses, I think it’s fair to justify that charge.

“Ted Turner was thrown out, so guess we can’t call him a dropout…”

It used to be possible to be thrown out of school, but the “student as customer” foolishness has ended that. That’s a shame, we could use a few more people as astute in business as Ted Turner. It’s possible we should blame higher education for the lack.

In another video, Gatto explains how to educate a child, at least if you want a genius.

He has an important message regarding higher education.

Gatto, to a GM executive after GM went belly up: “What happened?”

Executive: “Engineering, which used to be the fast track to the executive suite [i.e., leadership of GM]…stopped being the fast track. Finance became the fast track…”

I want to emphasize what happened here: GM used to rule the world when it came to cars, other countries couldn’t even come close (and other American companies could only keep up by hiring away GM engineers). But GM changed how it got its leaders. Instead of getting people that knew the business to run the business, it appointed people that knew nothing of how to build a great car, and the end result was quite predictable: GM became a company that could not build a decent car, much less a great car.

This is what we’re seeing now in higher education. In times past, the leadership of a university was drawn from the faculty of the university. In this manner, the university was able to excel at its job. It’s why the university system became adopted across the world as the primary method of advanced education. The American university system today has at best a very shaky grasp on the rulership of the higher education world. Actually, it has lost the leadership by a wide margin, according to a senate report I’ll address soon.

What happened?

Our system of higher education is no longer run by the people that know anything about higher education. Instead it’s run by a demented caste of plundering sociopaths, as I’ve documented so many times in this blog. They don’t come from the faculty anymore. The end result has been predictable: our institutions are being looted, and often become basket cases, paralyzed by issues that have absolutely nothing to do with education.

Within a generation, I can see someone walking up to a homeless man on the street, holding a sign: “Former Tenured Faculty. Nobel Prize Winner. Will Lecture For Food.”

When someone goes up to the bum and asks “What happened?” we all know what the answer will be. We know it because of John Taylor Gatto, and I encourage the gentle reader to watch many of his videos and read his works, especially if considering putting a child into the public education system.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com