A (hopefully) quick education rant

Look, I understand that the Republican leadership and the business leaders don't like academics who actually have some degree of independence and have an annoying penchant for pointing out what lying, underhanded pricks the Republicans and various industry agents are, but you don't have to go fucking up the American higher education system just because you're bitter.

Look, boys and girls: America doesn't produce shit anymore. Their manufacturing is dead, and agriculture is on its way out. The one (you hear me? The _one_!...) remaining competitive advantage we have is our academies, which are pretty much unparalleled in the world. Sure, they have their inefficiencies, but basically, yes, Mr. Miller, they're doing just fine, and we would do well to pat them on the back, say, 'Good job!", and give them more money to educate more people. The worst possible things you could do would be to a) drown them in standardized tests, or b) turn them into vocational schools that teach them just enough to get them employed.

American ingenuity is the one advantage we still have over the rest of the world, and these fuckers want to kill it. You breed ingenuity by both giving college students the background knowledge they need _and_ giving them relatively free reign to pursue the topics that interest them as per any decent liberal arts education. Making them take a semester class on fucking Excel just so companies can save on those training costs when they hire college grads is going to rapidly erode the quality of American universities and turn our college grads into mindless drones who not only can't think for themselves but know only how to perform drudgerous, repetitive tasks not even as well as their Indian and Chinese counterparts.

God I fucking hate businessmen who think the country should be run like a giant quantifiable assembly line.