Why Johnny Can’t Do Jack Sh*t

This guy has perfectly nailed or current screwed up intellectual and educational landscape:

Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy
of “white collar” versus “blue collar,” corresponding to mental versus
manual. These seem to be the categories that inform the educational
landscape even now, and this entails two big errors. First, it assumes
that all blue collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and
second, that white collar work is still recognizably mental in
character. Yet there is evidence to suggest that the new frontier of
capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to
factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements.

Crawford blows the whistle on the Education Mafia’s myth that everyone will have a wonderful, creative job once they get a college degree:

Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric
surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body
into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are
heading to a “post-industrial” economy in which everyone will deal only
in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as
thinking. White collar professions, too, are subject to routinization
and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual
fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are
appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process,
and then handed back to a new class of workers—clerks—who replace the
professionals. If genuine knowledge work is not growing but actually
shrinking, because it is coming to be concentrated in an ever-smaller
elite, this has implications for the vocational advice that students
ought to receive.

…and he has some great advice

So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to
college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship,
going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a
manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly
better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling
tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a
certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped
out by others as obligatory and inevitable.

Tip from The Corner (in a discussion that started with this)

Update (14 May).  The discussion widens to community colleges and developmental education over at Joanne Jacobs.  Follow the links.

Update (14 May).  The article that has everyone up in arms this week, Professor X’s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, is now on the web.  Thanks for the (somewhat irate) tip from Winds of Change.  I’m sympathetic with Professor X, but I’m not really on board with his approach.  I suspect his article is more an expression of frustration than anything else; X is running as fast as he can to keep the Wheel turning, when he really knows he should get off. It’s pretty obvious that many people and our current college system are a disastrous mismatch; thousands of students are dropping out or flunking out with nothing to show for their time but a pile of debt.  I’d like to think that our colleges see these students as more than just a source of income, but I see a lot of broken eggs and damn few omelettes.  Real soon now, we need to step back, take a deep breath, and sort out how to educate those people who, today, are "not cut out for college."