Doctors, Lawyers, Accountants and other Tradies

Universities were never intended to be apprenticeship schools, but they are. Nowadays, you can't get a job in a whole range of intellectual industries unless you've been to university and completed a related or general university degree. In effect, the university is the same for the lawyer, doctor, public servant, as the technical training school is for the plumber, builder, electrician. Universities pump out suit monkeys with degrees in exactly the same way that technical schools pump out tradies with trade certificates. On average, they even earn the same range of salary. The average public servant even earns slightly less than your average tradie.

Universities were intended to extend the wealth of collective human knowledge and wisdom. The great philosopher Plato opened his Academy, the world's first university, in ancient Athens to give adults the opportunity to learn a universal breadth of knowledge, to broaden their minds and contribute to the current body of things known and understood in the world, and beyond the world. In the Gardens of Academus, Plato taught the philosophical subjects of Logic, Ethics, Economics, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Politics and Natural Philosophy (now known as Science).

Plato's star pupil was Aristotle who went on to teach a young Alexander the Great and formed his own university the Lyceum. From Plato's Academy, we derive all our 'academic' words and language. More importantly, we also derive all of our institutes of higher learning, some of which offer a 'universal' understanding of the world and award their most accomplished students the title Doctor of Philosophy or PhD.

Universities were never intended to be factories for manufacturing lawyers, doctors, accountants and public servants. So, what the hell happened? A lawyer is just a tradie. A lawyer's trade is the Law. A lawyer is an expert in the Law, which they can prove to you by showing you their trade certificate (an undergraduate degree in law from a university). Like a brickie, a lawyer practices his trade by providing his learned services and skills to a paying client. So what's the difference between those smarmy, self-congratualting professionals with degrees and the average Joe tradie? Not a damn thing.

But Our cause is the conservation of the University. Its protection against being reduced from an institute of universal understanding, knowledge growth and the pursuit of wisdom to becoming nothing more than a suit factory, pouring out an endless stream of boring, pathetic, prententious, elitist mummies' boys clutching their trade certificates in law, accounting, IT and other tripe as they saunter into the money sector having left nothing behind, but debt and giving nothing back to society except another annoying service we all have to pay for when something goes wrong.




























Our suggestion is that we keep our once esteemed universities sanctified and preserved as institutes not of learning, not in the manner of a library or news agent where people come in and take things away for themselves, but to return universities back into institutes of contribution to the sum of all human knowledge and understanding. People come in and give to the university. They research, they propose their thesis, it is accepted or rejected, then they leave.

The only reason trades are taught at university is money. Trades in law, medicine and accounting are expensive, which is why only the rich can afford to pay for such learning. Years ago, universities  stooped beneath themselves and prostituted their knowledge to the rich in exchange for training their spoilt brats to be elitist tradesmen. This practice must end.

Lawyers, accountants, doctors, nurses, IT workers, plumbers, brickies, sparkies and other tradesmen should piss off out of universities and go learn your trade in a technical school or trade college, do your apprenticeship and get lost. Neither lawyer, nor sawyer, neither surgeon nor plumber, contributes to the collective wisdom of our world. They just learn enough to practice what the world already knows and then they leave. They give nothing back, so they have no business even looking at a university. Get over yourselves! Admit that you are what you are - a bunch of tradies -  and piss off.

Leave the practice of philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom to the thinkers. Doers should just do.