As we said above, it was not necessary for many in the past to attend such schools, because these schools provided an intellectual education that was not available elsewhere; craftsmen and artisans, on the other hand, needed not attend school since no class provided courses to teach what they did: it was done under the roof of a master, or, with the industrial revolution, no skills were necessary at all. Theoretically, the idea of providing as many children as possible with a primary and, even better, secondary education, is a good idea. Yet, the problem is that this movement became intertwined with the failure of traditional education of the political and social elite. When the ideal of citizenship had clearly failed, schools lost much of their substance, and their curriculum was redirected towards more immediate needs, especially economic needs. Perhaps the mistake here was to ‘popularize’ schools in a way that only concerned itself with numbers: the more graduates come out of schools, the more successful things will be. And as economic needs required more and more flexibility, schools, and especially universities, lost most or all of the ideal of citizen perfection that had helped create them to become rather agents of the new economic system, providing it with skilled intellectual and manual workers.
When one enters the university, the main focus is the career: one enrolls in a business program, in a science program, or psychology program, with a view to get a job and then climb the social ladder. this, is turn, breeds competition. We have often heard that schools and universities are places where the student “learns life,” meaning by this competition with one another. If one wants to work as a sales person, as a manucure specialist, as a business person, etc, one must beforehand obtain a degree form a specialized institution, i.e. a university, where one would have, in the past, received direct, perhaps better, training with a working person. In this way, where schools and universities previously had offered education, they now provide specialized training rather than true education, as Plato remarked in the quote above. It is doubtful whether we may rightly be justified in having more graduates than ever before: it is brushing off the value of diplomas.
