American education used to be good, but it was good because it mandated literacy and basic math. Beyond that, it expanded into more esoteric wastelands of philosophy. And then the teachers union got something called tenure and the very worst teachers could no longer be fired. They became social cancer, demotivating quality and driving the schools into the toilet. Things have gotten bad.
The end product of moden education is the snowflake. That is a lawyer with a child whining on the front of a fishhook as bait. Snowflakes have ruined public life for civil servants like librarians. They reject free speech as offensive, just like Nazi SS-Gestapo. They have temper tantrums wearing black hoodies and ballistic nylon, assaulting people in attempted murder.
They are no longer civilized, and are now insurgents. At this point, anyone calling themselves a "social justice warrior" should be treated as terrorists, but the current Republican administration is unwilling to act on this threat, much like the prior one ignored Muslim terrorists until they became a daily threat at airports and public gatherings around the world.
The bigger problem has expanded past public schools and liberal colleges. These are now training grounds for leftist thugs. UC Berkeley has inadvertantly made its graduates unhireable. Allowing violence on their campus, by their students and professors creates an unreasonable risk for company insurance, so hiring a Berkeley grad puts your insurance rates so high you go out of business. You are better off refusing them without explanation, and those Berkeley grads are going to know this soon enough. Other schools with similar famous snowflakes or riots are also experiencing #blacklist problems. Social Justice Warrior are another kind of ethnomasochist terrorists. Harvard has banned clubs, associations, sororities, fraternities, etc and you can now be kicked out of the school for belonging to anything at all. Harvard is on my hiring #blacklist too. When I have the power to hire, I won't be hiring people from those schools.
Business today is mostly done with overseas cutouts, and other nonsense to avoid paying taxes. What used to be good paying jobs with that college degree now gets you a PT job for minimum wage. Voting to raise minimum wage has resulted in kiosk computers with ATM card readers to replace all those retail jobs. Fewer and fewer people are needed to run industry today. Automation has defunded everything. Without jobs, there's no money to buy stuff. The youngest generation is screwed, and they're pretty much in revolution. They aren't worth hiring, and robots don't complain.
The problem here is since education doesn't make a better paying job, and it doesn't with few exceptions, the point of education is largely lost. Higher education today is actually a negative. Both to time lost, and to your total income because you have to either pay off loans or work for years to catch up to those lost while you were listening to Leftist moron professors lying to you in a classroom.
In the real world, you only get a job when the work you do is both profitable and cheaper than a robot can do the same work. Or software. Maintaining robots that do work is one of the few growth industries, but the pay rate is falling, so whatever you think you'll earn when you start learning that job, it will keep getting worse pay and higher stress the longer you keep at it. Just like IT jobs. Expect to drive long distances to places without A/C in the worst weather, where a stressed out manager full of threats, looking for empty promises to blame you for breaking when the problem they've got is worse than expected because they cheaped out on replacement parts or a bad repair contract or sabotage causes these problems in the first place. You don't need a degree to do that. You may as well get hired on right out of high school.
What this means to librarians, like me, is that communists in our field with dreams of running a public pool or drug treatment program or cafe with Rasberry Pi tinker toys, all those non-librarian jobs, is lots of libraries are going to be closed, entirely. They are killing our public civic institution. The books will be sold off or discarded or given to charities who are still doing those basic jobs like store books for loan, and the public funded librarians are doomed. In places where there is oversight and strict limitation of library work to actual librarian jobs, not all this nonsense which most of my professors wrongly believe to be important. I suspect half the people I know in library science are going to end up serving coffee. Most libraries are going to end up as servers in a closet somewhere.
The other aspect is that colleges are becoming hostile work environments and could very well end up defunded by the Federal government, and lose their accreditation when the lose their libraries. And it won't matter, because colleges are a business, not educators. What they sell is adult babysitting for teenagers, not functional adults like they used to produce in the old days. And even when they create adults from the #SJW-Taliban trash that so many public schools produce today, there are few jobs for adults anymore, and those which exist don't pay enough to buy a house. Thank the Dodd-Frank act for that. Dodd-Frank is the big reason for the boomerang kids. And why I'm so in favor of homes on wheels. It avoids a bunch of the problems in home ownership, especially all the taxes or being trapped in a collapsing economy. You can hitch up and go. And so much of the Western states are really about Boom Towns. They boom and they bust. That's life.
