the problem with education

Nothing coherent here since I'm not sure how I feel about the issue, but here are couple of dangling thoughts and responses to things I've been reading*:

John Derbyshire critiques educational theorists in his article "The Dream Palace of Educational Theorists" in The New English Review for making faulty assumptions about human nature, namely that we are a blank slate, on which nurture is everything, and nature is negligible.

[Do I want to believe his assertion that the course of our lives are already inscribed into our DNA? Not really, though I will admit that freedom as conceived by postmoderns, is an illusion and a farce (appropriately so, that freedom has no essence). Is then my only other option to be one of those crazy left-wing liberals who believe more government funds means social transformation? I hope not.]

A few noteworthy excerpts unrelated to John Derbyshire's main point, that take a jab at today's "education" system:

"Towering over all these lesser scams is the college racket, a vast money-swollen credentialing machine for lower-middle-class worker bees. American parents are now all resigned to the fact that they must beggar themselves to purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paid outsource-able office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paid, un-outsource-able work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation.**"

"Professionals have their own credentialing systems: You may have graduated law school, but you’ll still have to pass the bar exam, and so on. Then why make aspiring lawyers go to law school? Presumably for the same reason we insist on cube jockeys having bachelor’s degrees from accredited four-year colleges. Why not let them study up at home from Teaching Company DVDs, then sit for a state-refereed common exam when they feel they’re ready? Why not let lawyers learn on the job from books and as articled clerks, the way they used to? I don’t know. College-going is just an irrational thing we do, the way upper-class German men used to acquire dueling scars, the way women in imperial China had their feet bound. Griggs vs. Duke Power probably has something to do with it. Since, following that decision, employers are not permitted to test job applicants to see how intelligent they are, the employers seek a college degree as a proxy for intelligence."

It's beginning to resemble the corporation***. Creating needs that were not there before so that the organization can justify its own existence. How very cyclical (it's almost like a perpetual motion machine!) and meaningless.

* I've finally realized that if I wait until I have coherent thoughts before making a posting. I NEVER post anything. And when I do, someone always manages to refute my argument, rendering it as obsolete and useless as a undergraduate degree :)
** A good article on this very subject is Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford in the New Atlantis
*** And by corporation, I mean the EVIL CORPORATION. I have to write that in caps because I can't take myself seriously when I say that. That terms been thrown around so much I'm not sure what it means anymore.