Quendi, I don't necessrily disagree with what you are saying here in terms of the shades of the Wt stance against education. But I have two questions/comments to make.
First, a review of an elder's qualifications, while not as bad as automatic deletion, is plenty bad, it seems to me. It's on a par with a company reviewing whether it needs your position -- it isn't as bad as a layoff, but you'd put a similar level of effort into avoiding the review as you would avoiding the layoff. Nothing good can come from a review of an elder's qualifications, from the elder's perspective.
I wonder if the brain drain is explained by the much greater level of higher education among regular middle class people. By that I simply mean that, 40 years ago, it may have been relatively easy to find enough competent guys to run the shop among those with a basic education. Higher education was not considered to be for everyone with average or better intelligence. Nowadays, it seems to be the case that we want everyone who can get through high school without a catastrophe to go on to college. Opposition to college is now forcing hard choices on a larger number of people, even those with unexceptional, but solid, ability.
On the other hand, and why I question that line of reasoning, there seems to be a real drive to the blisteringly ignorant in Wt literature, procedures, etc. How hard can it posibly be to run an average congregation these days? When it comes to printing the literature, you really only need a couple dozen well-trained guys, and the writing becomes less and less sophisticated every day. From this perspective, attacking higher education seems like a net benefit -- and it isn't even close.
Your thoughts?
