Just so you know, this is not a post about communism, despite the title.
The US school system tries to suck as much money out of you as possible, as I'm sure everybody knows. I went to school in Germany for a year and they let you go to school basically for free if you got good grades. You didn't need to buy superfluous textbooks and they would let you test out of something if you asked for it. I can demonstrate a dozen times that I already know a subject and they still make me take the damn class. The textbooks in the US make me particularly mad because you have to always get the newest edition, even if it's about something like Linear Algebra which literally has not changed in a hundred years.
I'm also mad about the quality of education on the internet. It was great for everything I needed up until about about my sophomore year at college, at which point it started to get pretty useless. All the advanced subjects are explained in obscure ways that only people in that particular scientific in-group could understand and they often assume that you know 90% of the information anyway. I don't understand why a single person on the whole god damn earth can't post a concise and full explanation of Gullstard's equation with the associated optical plane equations and the sign convention and such. I've looked for hours and I've found dozens of half-explanations all with different conventions and almost none with pictures, and not surprisingly I still can't remember how to do it (I used it several times last year). The entirety of human knowledge should be available to every person online who cares to look. And yes I'm aware of hyper physics and khan academy and stuff like that. Khan academy doesn't address advanced topics and hyper-physics doesn't give in depth explanations of their equations; they literally just listed 3 equations without describing how they relate or what their sign conventions are.
The internet is so s**t and there are so few cheap opportunities to demonstrate aptitude in a subject that anyone who wants to learn is dependent on a predatory academic system. You should be able to do all this s**t by yourself at your laptop and then take some sort of free test after a few years that certifies that you are an engineer or some such s**t, with maybe some lab classes and thing like that where you need hand's on experience.
I'm quite angry at the moment and thinking that humanity as a whole is a disgusting race that sells its knowledge to the next generation for a buck.
20 Sep 2012, 8:26 pm
