A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
It doesn't.
It costs money to get a piece of paper that proves you got smarter.
You can go to any public library and get access to nearly published material to learn from for free.
All you're missing now is academia. So go bum around a public university library and ask some college student if they canl check something out for you. Admittedly there's a money piece here, there's way around it, not all of them legal, but that'd be your easiest path.
I understand that most universities and classes allow anyone to "audit" them. You can go to the lectures but you earn no credits.
The piece of paper is a barrier to entry, an entrenchment of academia in the global economy.
Read some Ivan Illich on the topic (Deschooling Society), he's pretty lucid and still very relevant 50+ years later.
Free education would empower 'those' people. And the right desperately needs an other to denigrate.
desperately need another to denigrate
Whoa whoa whoa we can't use that word man. Say "white wash" or "Jim Crow" or something.
Here in Sweden education is free, and the government provides a (small) monthly payout to students.
It’s one of the things I’m most grateful about living in Sweden. I wouldn’t be able to pursue higher education otherwise.
Social infrastructure FTW, a far more respectable way to run the ship. I'll keep with the boat analogy to use another idiom; "a rising tide lifts all boats" society shows wisdom in encouraging the kinds of conditions where their citizens can succeed without significant barriers, and improve the whole of it afterward (instead of the banking institutions which extend predatory high-interest loans) with their success. Hats off to Sweden.
Here in Sweden education is free
Free at point of service. But it's 7% of Swedish GDP, with all of that coming from public coffers.
Compare it to the US, which spends only 5.5% of GDP on education, with the majority on the heavily privatized university level.
The math gets worse when you look at student/teacher ratios, administration overhead, building construction, and spending on extracurriculars like sports.
Americans spend less overall than their swedish counterparts, but far more on amenities that have nothing to do with the actual mechanics of education.
According to my American economics education, this proves the American system is actually more efficient. Swedes would do better to adopt our model, if they want to be A#1 Liberty Whiskey Sexy, like we are.
More efficient for whom? And how? Because this is kind of hard to agree with when the efficient solution is a small amount of people with huge amounts of debt and everyone else not getting an education even if they want it.
I mean, what's the point of public coffers if they aren't being spent on public good?
More efficient for whom?
That would be the people paying less tax....
It doesn't benefit the ruling class if too many of the wrong people access education; they may get ideas.
may start voting to the wrong politicians
Disclaimer: I 100% support "free" healthcare and "free" education.
Being a teacher is a job. Being a college professor is a job. Being a nurse is a job. Being a janitor for a college campus is a job. People need money and benefits to do jobs. We've not yet achieved a post-scarcity economy where people can work without being reimbursed for their efforts.
Anyone who labels the goal of providing publicly-funded education or publicly-funded healthcare as "free" is either arguing in bad faith or too naive to understand what the goal should be. As a society we should provide public services, such as education and healthcare, to all humans who ask for it. For the good of all humans. But it's something we all have to collectively fund.
Free to the user... Are you just trying to muddy this water?
Not at all.
By calling for education and healthcare to be free, you're voluntarily giving ammunition to politicians that they can use to sway low-information voters.
If every person who supported public education and public healthcare stopped calling it free right now, the people against these public services would still call them free. Because they want it to sound like people are trying to get something for nothing. They like it when we call it free.
Calling something free just conforms to the narrative that education and healthcare are something you would have to pay for in the first place. Why would you ever have to pay for a basic human right?
A man I respect quite a lot used to say that college should pay a full-time wage to the students. It should be challenging, it should be a real education (which a lot of modern college is not), and in exchange for that, if you are improving your understanding of the world and your ability to contribute to society, that should be something that society pays you a pretty decent wage for, because it's a fucking valuable activity.
Which also means there should be rigorous standards to continue; similar accountability to any other job.
You shouldn't be able to collect a hefty check and be like my college friend. He who failed out of our college 4 times because he was just there to go to bars do his own thing (which was not going to class or doing homework or really anything else).
I taught 3rd year humanities students in a communication related course who could not string words together into a coherent sentence. All their writing was education gore and I could only get through it by briefly pretending it was avant garde. We collectively let them get that far with core incompetencies. Shame.
It really should be a challenge. The saying at my kids college/university was "A 'C' gets a degree". And while "haha that's funny" there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
For work, my team and I work with engineer types, and its been a 10 years span of helping them. The newer graduates are a mixed bag: some are bright and innovative, and some are coasters.
We've had young guys asking for help on a problem, and as you help they start replying to text messages on social media, missing the entire "help" session you provide.
We've had grads struggle with simple counting / talling.
We have done step by step troubleshooting documentation. Then field a call from somebody saying the steps don't work. OK let's see your system and go through the steps. Let's check Step 1.
Them: oh I didn't do step one, because it said I didn't have system permission. So I just did step 2 onward.
I could go on, but I should end this rant LOL.
Yeah. I was really blessed in terms of my upbringing that my family deeply valued education and taught me what was education and what was a stupid waste of time (which, some but not all of the public school US education I got was) and why the education was a vital human sacred thing. And so when I got to college I really wanted the real education part. It really alarmed me when people would be happy about the easy bullshit classes or upset about the difficult classes. Like bro... why the fuck are you even here? Learn HVAC instead, you'll save some money on loans and you can probably make more than you would as a data analyst or whatever the fuck.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved in higher education, then the republicans got big mad about that and changed the rules because they're racist pieces of shit. They would rather make everyone suffer if it hurts one person who isn't a white christian republican.
There's more detail but that's the short version.
Here in Aus it was free up until the 90's. When one of my coworkers told me that I actually nearly started the revolution then and there lmao. All this talk about how hecs is a good system from all these privileged ass old people when they didn't have to pay a dollar >:(
Something something bootstraps avocado toast. 🙄
For what its worth, you can sit in on most if not all lectures, without paying. Tutorials, exams and the fancy robe and paper cost, but to sit and listen to the lectures is free at all unis. Some caveats apply regarding crowding, but generally you can acquire knowledge for free.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved
Black students, Jewish students, East Asian students... Anyone who wasn't a WASP with wealthy parents.
George Bush Jr famously had to make Yale his safety school because he couldn't qualify for UTexas.
So that's why the USA is the primary source of monetised knowledge. Fwiw I fully support pirating educational media, because if many countries of the world can access a significant amount of education for free, everyone should have the same chance, regardless of how the government of the locale wants to rule and restrict it.
I support fair wages for those who deliver publicly available services at material cost only or lower, so I support taxation that finances it and minimum wage regulation. Even though I believe the current minimum wage in the West isn't sufficiently regulated. It needs to triple in order to catch up to the 'inflation', or the perceived monetary value of everything.
Can you elaborate? I've never heard this before, and for most of the 1960s it was the Democrats who were the racist pieces of shit (to the extent it was even partisan).
Not saying you're wrong; I have a vague notion that Reagan mostly was the one who ruined higher education but I don't actually know that much about it. Is there something I can read about this though?
Yeah, so it was Reagan. It doesn't sound really racial, it sounds like it was a reaction against the antiwar and student activism movement (which was definitely not exclusively a black thing). Sounds like it was Republicans, yes, but more than racism it was just part and parcel of them hating things that make America successful or enable us to compete (because that makes them feel weak, because they can't.)
I might argue the Vietnam War was what really changed things. Once college became a means of draft dodging, universities filled up with blue collar kids looking for deferment.
Colleges responded by tightening enrollment standards and setting up new barriers to entry, some of which were financial.
It's still free. You're not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials. No one is stopping you from going to the library and learning. The internet hosts a large wealth of knowledge.
I'm ready for those downvotes, but it's just a hardpill to swollow
I would argue that primarily youre paying for the recognition of your education, as in your diploma, which is often what employers look at.
You're not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials.
Bingo. When my mom went to the University of New Hampshire in 1962, they had one cafeteria in the Student Untion Building and the athletics was run out of a "field house" built in the 40's and the students in dorms slept on WWII surplus cots in a room with 4 others. The amenities were sparse, to say the least.
60+ years later, it's all spiffy amenities, a huge arena with the bells and whistles for the athletics department and shared rooms with washer/dryer hookups and a Memorial Union building that contains the restaurant/cafeterias "dining halls" now.. and the cost soared once the flashy stuff was added in.
Thing is, it's been a self-feeding spiral as schools raised prices, parents demanded more luxuries for their little darlings, so the schools went into a upgrade game with each other that took on the tint of a competition and it just furthered the pressure on the price to rise.
The education - the actual purpose of the schools - seems to have gotten lost in the game of chasing after the money.
This is part of why I've been telling my friends kids to aim for a trade school with an apprenticeship or journeymen's program tied to it. Done right, the kids can come out of the school go right into paid training and be debt-free and working by the time they're 20.
And honestly, given how shit the quality of housing built in the last few decades has been, it's gong to be a guarantee that repair and maintenance is the wave of the future.
Sause: Have been in the Trades since 1980..
This is exactly right. There are countless free classes on coursera, edx and Harvard for free. And read. Read real books, daily. A degree costs money because it’s proof of learning. In theory. It really isn’t, of course, because most US universities are diploma mills.
RIP Aaron Swartz
To be fair a lot of college graduates learn very little.
Khan Academy is also free and amazing. It's possible with free YouTube and KA to learn nearly any subject you desire.
This may not be a popular opinion but I personally reject the belief that universities have a monopoly on education. In fact I think most are designed to create a more compliant employee.
That said libraries are free, piracy is free, YouTube hosts millions of lectures by experts in their field and can be downloaded to watch or listen offline. I personally have spent the past couple years learning about the affects of US imperialism and haven’t spent a cent on it
I think most are designed to create a more compliant employee.
Thus is exactly it. The diploma is proof that you're willing to play the game and become a debtor and can be squeezed - HARD - because of it.
It doesn't? You're paying for brand recognition and a piece of paper that says you can follow directions and spend money. Learning is free. Don't let capitalism tell you what's important.
There are all sorts of classes available at top schools via opencourseware. You can take the highest tier courses that the US has to offer, and become educated. While not degree offering, it still would look great on a CV, if you can somehow prove you did the work.
Free books. A few years ago, I read a free electrical engineering book available on the internet, which I found fascinating. It has been a little helpful in practice as well, but I think it’s just cool to know how capacitors and motors work. Public libraries exist for a reason. Gutenberg is another option.
Many 2 year community colleges are now free tuition if you reside in the state.
And of course, there are still ways to get a degree cheap, if the paper is important to you. I finally landed at WGU 15 years ago and it was very reasonable, and has paid dividends on my original investment.
