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Elle Griffin's avatar

I love the idea of a corporate-paid apprenticeship! I know Google does that for hiring tech workers out of high school. They actually train them in coding at Google.

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Gérard Mclean's avatar

That makes me bristle... coding is a trade whereas an education across a broader study where one is exposed to philosophy, poetry, ethics, history, language, cultures unlike your own leads you to question WHY you are writing this code, WHO it affects and whether or not you should be writing this code.

A bulldozer operator might be great at their job, but if they bulldoze an entire village with people living there, that’s... probably bad. A drone operator might be great at their job but if they use those skills to carpet bomb an entire swath of civilian housing, hospitals and schools... that’s probably bad.

Of course Google wants fresh kids to train how to code so they never have the outside exposure to question if they should be writing that code....

And I know for damn sure that is a bad thing.

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Clarence Williams's avatar

If an employer values exposure to those "boader studies," they can pay for them in the form of some kind of apprenticeship. There's no reason to limit this college/business partnership to "trade skills."

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Elle Griffin's avatar

Yes but is it really your college electives that make you a moral drone operator?

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Gérard Mclean's avatar

No, not directly. But if you never have exposure to any world outside of your insular community, you don’t know what you don’t know. Corporations know this. It’s baked into their “benevolence” and their funding in anything education. (I’ve been in meetings where this was expressed quite bluntly, especially at the start of the dot-com era. I’m watching corporations taking over public education in my state of Ohio! They aren’t even being subtle about it anymore... because they don’t have to...) Corporations, militaries don’t want thinkers; they want do-ers.

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Elle Griffin's avatar

I'm all for morality and ethics and philosophy being part of the school system, but that's not typically part of the core curriculum.

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