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> What proportion of applicants makes it as a Navy SEAL, is it even 1 in 10? I am saying you can teach most people the content of an excellent university educa

by artsrc 16y ago

> What proportion of applicants makes it as a Navy SEAL, is it even 1 in 10? I am saying you can teach most people the content of an excellent university education. I kind of knew that my point about training techniques could easily be misunderstood. I am not trying to say there are not elites in the military, Seals are elite. What percentage of people fail basic training? If elitism is "a situation in which power is concentrated in the hands of a limited number of people". Then opposites of elitism are freedom, and direct democracy. We are talking about education. Look at literacy levels Sweden. Here is my understanding of how it works: people who don't meet the standard have to go to night school till they meet it. They have the highest rates of adult literacy in the world. Do they have mediocrity? Do they have elitism? Can excellence be nearly universal?

gaius 16y ago
I am saying you can teach most people the content of an excellent university education. That is absolutely not true. My undergraduate degree was in Mech Eng. Even people with As in A-level maths and physics struggled with some of the course. Half (possibly more) of the freshers I enrolled with didn't graduate from that course with me, they either dropped out altogether or switched to something easier. Or some people repeated a year. But if you don't get partial differential equations (for example) on the second attempt, you're probably not going to get them ever. Doesn't mean you're a bad person - just means you should do something else with your life. A vanishingly small percentage of the population is capable of a true university education. The only way to enroll more is to relax the standards and simplify the material. Which is exactly what New Labour did with their arbitrary goal of 50% of the population to be graduates. BTW according to Wikipedia, of every 200 applicants to the SAS (most of whom have already qualified as Paras, they're already elite) only 30 make it. Or if you want to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force, or a Captain in the Navy. Using your analogy, perhaps basic training is analogous to secondary school - it is certainly not analogous to a degree.

by artsrc 16y ago

gaius 16y ago

I am saying you can teach most people the content of an excellent university education. That is absolutely not true. My undergraduate degree was in Mech Eng. Even people with As in A-level maths and physics struggled with some of the course. Half (possibly more) of the freshers I enrolled with didn't graduate from that course with me, they either dropped out altogether or switched to something easier. Or some people repeated a year. But if you don't get partial differential equations (for example) on the second attempt, you're probably not going to get them ever. Doesn't mean you're a bad person - just means you should do something else with your life. A vanishingly small percentage of the population is capable of a true university education. The only way to enroll more is to relax the standards and simplify the material. Which is exactly what New Labour did with their arbitrary goal of 50% of the population to be graduates. BTW according to Wikipedia, of every 200 applicants to the SAS (most of whom have already qualified as Paras, they're already elite) only 30 make it. Or if you want to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force, or a Captain in the Navy. Using your analogy, perhaps basic training is analogous to secondary school - it is certainly not analogous to a degree.