Triumph Of The Computer Nerd
Written by redqueeninla in Education
Once upon a time computer nerds were stored in the basement, sometimes in the garage or in a forgotten meeting room at school; nowadays we store them in boardrooms and cabinet offices and among venture philanthropy concerns.
The last laugh of the intellectual ought to be occasion for celebration. But not when the evil genius is twisted at the expense of humanism or evidence-based logic (a true tautology that somehow, in today’s euphemistic edubabble actually passes as an acceptable conditional). There is so much going on these days in obeisance to the hegemony of technology that just makes no sense from a human-point-of-view, you just have to wonder about those nerds.
There are a lot of examples to highlight. Key among them might be the subversion of empathy for children and a cherishing of their childhood at the command of Big Education’s Testing Imperative. It is nothing short of heart-breaking to read thousands of anecdotes about children’s test-misery.
But on the other end of the spectrum, big children, high schoolers, are being subjected to an absolutely out-of-control amplification of that vortex of miserytoo, and to what end?
Because association and causality are widely conflated, college attendance has been railroaded as a ticket to economic security since it was once observed to be associated with it. But there is no certainty that simple attendance is relevant toeconomic success – even presuming that was the sole justification for attending college anyway. But at the least, merely attending college is never going to be the wellspring of success in contrast with that which was once required in order toattend and graduate from an institute of higher education: let’s call this, say, Triumph Of The Computer Nerd – redqueeninla: