I think it's important for you to not go trolling.
A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money. Please, in the future, use figures which are more closely based in reality.
However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you).
I think it is very important for middle class families to partially pay for part of student's college tuitions. For one, there is the very likely possibility that one of these students will go on to be a future Proust, and I think it is very important to have the resources available for such a person, even though much of that money will be 'wasted' on people who will go on to be waiters.
Secondly, we live in a mostly democratic society, for better or for worse the opinions of the public can very much shape important political and economic decisions made by our leaders. It is therefore extremely important that the public be educated enough to understand arguments made by our leaders, and to be able to parse evidence presented by experts. Obviously I don't expect the public to understand all of the details of everything, but they need to be able to listen, and to know when they don't know anything at all and shut the fuck up.
We as a society can't move forward without understanding what happened in our past, what we've done right, and what we've done wrong. Right now, high school is very good about telling us certain things, while college is very good helping us understand things. For better or for worse, at some point we have learn how to analyze, and that is something that is not done very well in high school. So, you can either ask your middle class families to pay up to reform high schools, or you can ask middle class families to continue to pay for some individual's college tuitions.
> A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money.
> However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you).
So you clearly don't know what a realistic figure is, which means you obviously have no clue as to what an unrealistic figure is, yet you're highly critical of his ballpark analogy yet you can't even guesstimate to a figure within the city that the ballpark is in!
Perhaps you should ask where the original commenter is from. I grew up in the UK, the government paid for around 800GBP worth of education in night classes I took. I'm not even sure what the price tag on my 2-year certification course was but I'm sure it was a little more than a weekly Psychology and Sociology course.
As I've said before here, what pays my bills is using a hammer. At one point I was coding in HTML and PHP while I was 14 in high school, and I was pushed by every faculty member into going to university (I'm assuming to justify their own existence). I would have loved to go to university, I would have loved to have the opportunity to study psychology or ancient history, or some such... there's books for curiosity.
I use a hammer, and metal shears, and a drill. These are the basic of the basic, the most mundane objects in existence and I see dozens of intelligent, well educated people walk into a job and quit or get fired because they struggle to use them because of shitty education.
I have my woodwork and metalwork teachers to thank for a good education, one that anywhere in the world is guaranteed to pay my bills. Why is our education system set out to target self-actualization when it doesn't even teach us how to achieve our physiological needs.
First and foremost we should be teaching our children how to make money; how to work a job. Second, we should be teaching our children how to spend money; avoiding reliance on credit cards and debt traps. The aim is to improve peoples happiness, but without even teaching the basic steps on the hierarchy, it's a fruitless effort.
If more money out of my pocket would mean better education for the next generation, I'm happy to do it. I would actually love to see a generation of children told "you know it's okay to want to do carpentry, or to become a mechanic". If bashing the frivolity of higher education will get that, then I'll be happy to bash away to get a decent economy and a decent citizenry.
However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you).
I think it is very important for middle class families to partially pay for part of student's college tuitions. For one, there is the very likely possibility that one of these students will go on to be a future Proust, and I think it is very important to have the resources available for such a person, even though much of that money will be 'wasted' on people who will go on to be waiters.
Secondly, we live in a mostly democratic society, for better or for worse the opinions of the public can very much shape important political and economic decisions made by our leaders. It is therefore extremely important that the public be educated enough to understand arguments made by our leaders, and to be able to parse evidence presented by experts. Obviously I don't expect the public to understand all of the details of everything, but they need to be able to listen, and to know when they don't know anything at all and shut the fuck up. We as a society can't move forward without understanding what happened in our past, what we've done right, and what we've done wrong. Right now, high school is very good about telling us certain things, while college is very good helping us understand things. For better or for worse, at some point we have learn how to analyze, and that is something that is not done very well in high school. So, you can either ask your middle class families to pay up to reform high schools, or you can ask middle class families to continue to pay for some individual's college tuitions.