Quote:
Originally Posted by foreverwar
That's why I repeated the original statement - "highly educated", rather than just "educated"....
To me (and I should have clarified my interpretation of the phrase, even though I did not originate it in this thread), it means at least a PhD, which requires "original thinking".
I also think there may be confusion between clever/highly educated and having "common sense" - I think those are completely different things; people can have both attributes, but not necessarily.
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Indeed, I find that working in Higher Education, the two are often mutually exclusive. I know many very clever people (including Professors) who have little or no common sense.
---------- Post added at 19:38 ---------- Previous post was at 19:36 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
Once upon a time, a degree course either trained you for a highly complex vocation (for example, in engineering or the sciences), or else it just trained you how to think, the better to equip you for any of a range of less technically specialised roles in life. This, of course, was the good old general arts degree ... History, English Lit and the like.
Sadly these days, the politically motivated rush to get everyone who wants one a bit of paper with 'degree' scrawled on it has led to an explosion of vocational courses and a generation of people who have wasted three years learning a narrow subject (there were some students on TV the other day who were engaged on a three year degree course in how to design well-drained sports pitches - I kid you not) such that they know all the ins and outs of that subject but are woefully lacking when it comes to the general study and analysis skills that are so useful in life.
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One would hope that students would learn how to design good drainage systems (which could drain the sports pitches) as part of a wider, engineering based degree. Sadly, that's not the case.