Education

Want to learn about the history of economics, how to code with Ruby on Rails, or the essentials of string theory? It’s all out there for free on the internet, and anyone who has the time or energy can learn it directly from the experts.

The Information Age grants us an unprecedented amount of access to the world’s knowledge – and some thinkers like James Altucher or Peter Thiel see this leading to a path where the role of colleges and universities will continue to diminish.

A former military leader wants schools to start teaching children about major terrorist attacks to avoid leaving them susceptible to online conspiracy theories. Sound more like indoctrination than education…we can’t have children being taught anything that isn’t the ‘official version’ of the truth now can we? Lord West of Spithead, the former First Sea Lord and former chief of defence intelligence, said that schools should add terrorist attacks like 9/11 and 7/7 to the curriculum so that young people understand the ‘facts’ behind what happened.

The University of Glasgow has introduced ‘trigger warnings’ into a theology course in case students get distressed when studying the crucifixion of Jesus. The warnings were introduced for students taking a class called Creation to Apocalypse: Introduction to the Bible (Level 1) at the prestigious university which is part of the elite Russell Group RT reports: Popular in US educational institutions, trigger warnings were introduced to warn people about content which may ‘trigger’ a post-traumatic stress reaction.

There is little doubt that easy access to federally subsidized student loans has contributed to the astronomical increase in the cost of attending college in the United States.  After all, what 18 year old would turn down $200,000 in free money to party for 4 years?  As an added bonus, when you figure out upon graduation that your degree in anthropology if fairly worthless, you can always just move back in with mom and force taxpayers to pick up your debt burden.  Anything less would be a substantial "triggering" event and we just can't have that.