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A rather intersting opinion on education. Not sure that I agree, but I certainly understand your point.
I'm not exactly sure if companies hire dumb people on purpose. I mean yeah, they can take advantage of dumbasses, but wouldn't it make sense to hire smart motivated individuals who you won't have to baby sit. Plus, if you get highly motivated workers you won't need as many employees. I just think that most of the population is stupid. I'm not sure where the fault lies. Isn't it our own responsibility to get educated? All the tools to learn are out there. We just need to use them..... How do you teach motivation?
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Have you heard of the term "over-qualified"? I think companies tend to want the people that are going to stick around and allow themselves to get walked on rather than people that are motivated and want to work up the ladder. Yeah, they are going to want some people that are very motivated, but for the boring grunt work that anyone can do there is no reason to. Either they'll stay or they'll leave and they are easily replaced. Though, I guess it really depends on the industry and the company on an individual basis, it is hard to make generalizations that work for everything on this matter.
Is it our personal responsibility to get educated? Yes, but does that also mean that the people who aren't educated aren't educated just because they're lazy or unmotivated? For people like me, school was a positive experience. I was able to go nearly everyday, my classes weren't too hard (yet typically were challenging for me), and I was able to do my homework easily (having a computer and support at home). When someone has to work a second job, or help the parents on the farm (which I saw a lot with the poor and Hispanic familes back home), or if the parents don't emphasize the importance of education and make it difficult for the student to actually get to school at all, or when someone has some processing difficulty that makes it embarrassing to be in a class with other kids and the school doesn't realize the kid needs an IEP or a 504, or when going to school is a violent experience, etc etc etc the incentive to learn and to get educated is gone. Unfortunately, even kids have lives that can prevent them from succeeding later on in life. This is generally connected directly with the drug abuse that you're bound to see with someone stuck in a life that they don't want to be in.
How do you teach motivation? After a certain point it probably is a lost cause with some people. There is a strong cultural phenomenon that is promoted by the media (I know how we love to harken on the media, but I've seen this so many times that I have to mention it) that encourages people to defer responsibility from themselves to practically anything else. This is quite a barrier to motivating people when the cultural standard is to not take responsibility for one's own life. The schizopheric nature of our society is clear here, because we also laud those Puritan ideals of a work ethic. "Anyone can do anything if they work hard enough, and if didn't work out it isn't your fault." is generally the message that I see. Also, when people don't succeed right away, even going back to grade school and middle school they tend to be put on a track when it is reinforced for them to fail. Eventually, many of these people expect to fail at what they do, their motivation is shot because every time that they have been motivated before they got crapped on. I would guess, that in most cases, bad family experiences contribute to all of this the most.