Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Should we defund academia?" video.

  1. A friend of mine with a PhD said academia with university tenure is a paid holiday for slackers.
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  2. Um exams, nah we don't need that. No need to test the actual student's knowledge. During the Cultural Revolution in 1973, a youth named Zhang Tieshang sumitted a blank exam paper during the gaokao (or university entrance exams). He was from the lumpen proletariat (Marx's words meaning lower working class) and probably could not read. Note, if you do an exam, you are supposed to be able to read the questions. He was admitted under a political proviso dictated by Mao to allow a backdoor to working class illiterates into university without educating them at school first. That would be so anti-revolutionary bourgeois to school educate them. In any case, Mao had largely wrecked schools and school education across China during the Cultural Revolution, turning schools into a political battlefield between teachers and students. Numerous students and teachers were murdered at schools during the violence (it was compulsory to attend schools, particularly teachers as your families would be victimised by the state). An entire generation of kids failed to get mostly any sort of education in China from the mid 1960s to 1970s when Mao finally died.
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