14 Comments
User's avatar
Alan Schmidt's avatar

I know a lady getting a PhD in "Educational Leadership". It's literally five years of learning how to be a cog in the educational bureaucracy.

Expand full comment
Zachary McClanahan's avatar

Education doctorates consistently score the lowest on IQ tests, yet they run the entire education system. We should abolish that degree entirely. It’s not even a PhD.

Expand full comment
Jake Wiskerchen's avatar

This is true.

The graduate students in mental health are emerging with marginally passable knowledge, few skills, and even less critical thinking ability. Scant few graduate as anything more than automatonic regurgitators of rote talking points and tropes, and what knowledge they do possess about the profession is merely memorized for the purpose of passing an exam. They cannot apply it in real life, and forget about diagnostic skills altogether.

It's so bad.

Expand full comment
Zachary McClanahan's avatar

Exactly, I think people mistake it for the attention economy we're in, but you get what you tolerate. When you let students come to class 15 minutes late, they will come 30 next semester. When you allow them to skip the reading, they won't read anything. Of course this is also a symptom of the universities accepting students for purposes of profit instead of merit as well. It's really sad to see how little people know when graduating.

Expand full comment
Dax Knuckleduster's avatar

Turns out that getting a degree in philosophy has actually nothing to do with developing ideas with logic, rationality, and debate, and everything to do with worshiping dysfunctional ideological "philosophers" from the 1930s to 1960s. And, the more morally bankrupt the "philosopher", the better.

Expand full comment
Zachary McClanahan's avatar

I really tried to get into philosophy post-Kant but it was so boring, dry, and meaningless. To this day I will take ancient greek texts over modern philosopy any day. Just because its boring doesn't mean it's important or good. It might just mean that it's shit.

Expand full comment
Dr Lawrence Patihis, PhD's avatar

JS Mill, The Vienna Circle, and Popper seem to be on the scientific or empirical branch of philosophy.

Expand full comment
joan rose's avatar

I couldn't have said it any better. Thank you.

Expand full comment
Farloticus's avatar

Substack is the new university

Expand full comment
aphatalo's avatar

Is it really typical for professors to refuse to give detailed feedback?

This matches my (quite limited) experience, and I'm wondering if the experience is typical.

Thank you.

Expand full comment
aphatalo's avatar

Excellent article. Thank you for writing this.

Expand full comment
Dr Lawrence Patihis, PhD's avatar

Academia could have done much better in the last 15 years, for sure.

Expand full comment
Daniel Scott Matthews's avatar

I know your pain and frustration, this phenomenon is not new either as I experienced it first hand almost 40 years ago in the degree course for a related discipline in Australia. AGI will destroy the power of the gatekeepers in the university system and that is a very good thing, in fact we should help it to accelerate the process.

Expand full comment
Zachary McClanahan's avatar

It's definitely reached a breaking point. You see articles everyday detailing how useless these students with bacelors degrees are. Shocking that teaching kids nihilism mixed with communism doesn't make them good workers.

Expand full comment