reets,

Some questions about education in 2072.

Why would people bother to get through vocational school if they can get a chip that does it for them, and guarantees a job? Tough job market, get a new chip.

Why would educational institutions have exams? Anyone could have an internal commlink with enough data even off of the Matrix to ace the test. With the help of a commlink, a student could do science problems or be able to explain complex historical events in a comprehensive manner, without actually understanding what they are saying.

Plagiarism continues to play the cat and mouse game, until someone figures out to use a text which can only be found in hardcopy form. Students still plagiarize each other.

What other issues would you see with 2072 among higher education?

I think "knowledge" isn't the problem. Creative thinking, an analytical mind is. One can see how the internet changed our learning and our expectations from education in the last twenty years already. The questions are not: What happened 1726? It became: Why did it happen, what do we learn from it? Can we apply it to our modern world now? Knowlede is "expected", or at least it is expected that you can retrieve it soon and begin to analyze it with nearly no delay.

Also i always think in 2072 there are just three types of jobs: The REALLY low ones. When the employer can't or won't use drones for menial labour. Middle management: Yeah those guys can maybe use the chips. And the professionals (Where skillsoft would be too weak) When i remember right skillsoft can only be level 5 maximum, (lvl 4 for active skills??) and can have no specialisations and do not allow for using edge. If you want the best results you can't rely on it. For the nameless, faceless workers the chips are good enough.

What i see as possible in higher education in 2072 would be some kind of simsense assistet I.Q. testing and expanding program. Some thing like an BTL-Machine, where you have intense "fire" in your pathways, widening and refining your "way of thinking". It would be a mix of a game, multiple skillsofts, a questionaire, stimulation for the senses, artificial stress and other affects on the psyche to "improve" the human mind. (And maybe a bit pro-con conditioning while we are at it?)

I foresee three large areas that tests would focus on; Creativity, Snapfire, and Omnidisciplinaran.

Creativity tests are as Summerstorm described; knowledge is assumed and you're tested on your ability to draw good and interesting conclusions. There is probably also a quite strong bias towards good style and writing quality. Snapfire is about large numbers of short questions on such a variety of subjects within the subject that you can't have enough knowsofts running at once to reliably get all the answers and attempting to load a new Knowsoft will make you lose marks. Snapfire will probably be weighted lowly, but probably provides some marginal benefits. Omnidisciplinarian questions are big long questions in the exam that are impossible to answer without a very wide and specific knowledge base that can't be handled by Knowsofts alone.

You can also use some statistical analysis with past data to identify whether someone exhibits characteristic patterns for Knowsoft usage, but really it's easier to defensively design the exams to cover enough topics that you have to know at least 50% of the course to get a decent grade. You can even adjust the weighting of questions dependant on how many people get it right, turning the exams into a very competitive environment.


I would also say that it's probably very hard to get Knowsofts on niche or cutting-edge topics. There just isn't the market for that kind of thing. So, past the first year (which is generally used to weed-out the completely hopeless people) you'll be tested on things that are actually up-to-date research.

Personally, I would have a plan to learn as much as I could about a chosen career field, and then run some chosen skill softs to compliment what i already know to make me more competitive in the market place. Like you could go to school for management and then slot medicine for a medical office manager, logistics for a shipping manager, or BSing for corporate management.

The corp is gonna hire whoever does well on the test, however they managed it.  And don't forget education is more than jsut "learning the facts and how to apply them. "  A corp is going to look at your extracuricular skills and background.  It's going to look at how well you socialized; are you a leader? a good follower?  Are you a go-getter?  

So yeah, there's still reasons to go to school instead of jsut jacking in a chip.  The company hiring you want's to see how you perform much more than how you achieved that performance.  After all, it's the corporate nature.  The bottom line is "Did we make more money?  Are we on the way to being the leaders in our field or maintaining that position? "Get it done Johnson.  Do what you have to.  I don't care if there isn't enough time or dollars in the budget.  You make it happen, or we'll find someone that can."

Vlad

There is a very interesting paragraph about chipped labour in Unwirred.

School isn't there just to get you a job. School is also there to get you a basic knowledge in a lot of different topics and to help you think. It's also where you learn to interact with other pepole and live in society. It's also for national cohesion: you're taught the history of your nation, the language of your nation, the geography of your nation, the values of your nation... That's why most democracies have compulsory education.
These reasons are enough to have primary and secondary education remain more or less the same as today.

Tertiary education is the one that could be impacted by skil/knowsofts, but that'd probably apply to low-rank jobs for reasons explained in other posts.

As for exams, I guess that they'd just ban commlinks for exams, just like computers and phones are banned today (at least around here).

School is primarily there to condition kids to sit still for eight hours of the day listening and working, instead of playing, socially interacting and other behaviour that is more natural to them, and to learn to be obedient. That's the primary requisite for creating a working class. Learning useful skills comes next. And all that stuff about national identity that you mentioned as well, of course. Do kids in the USA still have to do that pledging allegiance thing?

I agree with others that say that there would be different levels of work with some strict demarcations. Skillsofts and Knowsofts are great for repeatable tasks but I would guess they are of no use at all for primary research. You can't learn from skillsofts and knowsofts - as stated in the books, they subvert the normal learning process by the way they work. When you pull them out, the knowledge of skill is gone. I would guess that with the degree of automation available in 2070, research is one of the few areas in which humans can still get an edge. But the degree of education you'd have to have by SR2070 to do real research would be huge. You'd have to have absorbed, to some extent, all the previous research or at least be aware of what has already been done. Library science is a growing field, believe it or not, with a lot of research being done on categorisation of knowledge and making it searchable. Every year, researchers are checking to see what's already been done and sometimes, not finding it, leading to duplication of effort or following of dead ends. By 2070, someone wishing to do research is going to need a huge familiarity with their field just to know what is worth researching.

So what does that mean? I would reckon that you'd see people in very long term education if they wanted to do research. Whlist on the other hand, the uselessness to research of someone with less extreme levels of knowledge, accompanied by the ability to automate many tasks (not merely physical), either through software and machinery, or knowsofts and skillsofts, would render less committed educational paths, if not worthless, then pretty poor value for money. Why waste four years getting a degree when its still not going to qualify you for any high-end posts and you could have just got the skillwires when you were seventeen and spent the intervening time making money off them?

So similar to others, I see three tiers of worker.

High-investment employees. These are the ones that either a corp, or their parents, have funded eighteen to twenty-years of education into and are now conducting research, managing business decisions or similar. They typically started off in a privileged position being probably the second or third son / daughter of a well-off corp family. (The first children will be channeled into management. Supplementary children go into the priesthood sciences). Or else, they were promising students with some but not as much wealth, who indebted themselves to the corp and will spend much of their remaining life never quite paying off their debts. It is High-Investment employees that I see as the targets for extraction runs and it makes sense. Why spend all your own resources when you can just steal the results of a rivals? And the employee will probably love it when they realise they're no longer in debt and are actually earning.

Skillwired and knowsoft employees. These are the individuals with perhaps basic, but not high-end education. Skillwires are expensive so they're probably something a lot of people aspire to have. They're your modern day equivalent of having a degree and the entrance requirement is getting together the money to buy them. I could see a corp paying for people to have skillwires, but there would be a lot of people out there scrimping so they or their kid could get some, so it wouldn't always be that necessary. Knowsofts require even less investment so that's an even less competitive field. But keep in mind with Knowsofts, you still need the Attribute, so corps will only be hiring those that pass their aptitude tests and schooling doesn't just provide knowledge skills, but can build up attributes like Logic also. So this class is made up of either those who have stumped up enough money to afford their own skillwires and thus bought their way into being working class, or else of people that had the TWO essential qualities of decent attributes (Logic, Strength, whatever) and reliability (i.e. registered SIN, good address, minimal criminal record, etc).

The cheap employees. In most areas, people can't compete with automated systems. Their only option really is to do things more cheaply. And in 2070, that means really cheaply. We're talking minimal payments and sweatshop conditions. Probably most have a SIN, but you might get SINless working too for corp-scrip. These people really are desparate. This level of employment is probably only viable because cheap manufacturing, agriculture and power-generation (e.g. SR2070 has fusion as well as orbiting solar satellites) can push the cost of living down so low (for low-quality of live, of course).

That's my take on it anyway.

K.

Hey, somehow the OP made a double-post and the discussion ias split in two. Maybe we can correct that as long as the topic is still fresh!

I took the liberty to quote all replies from the other branch here:

My 'Face' has a legit background being a university student studying Law and Business (will shoot people, con, graft and steal things for tuition fees and food!) so I figured if I'm going to do well at school a cerebral booster II is probably going to be a fairly substantial edge over the other kids there, if I was going to be studying a fairly heavy mathematics/science courses I'd definately throw in the old maths SPU and maybe an encephelon as well.
Most of its actually legal and we haven't even touched on the data you could be carting around in your head, so kids with rich parents can definately make even the average idiot brat a B+ student with enough cash.



(christ I wish this stuff was real when I went to uni, it'd almost make up for the braincells I killed with beer and wine..)

But once you have a cerebral booster II and a SPU and encephelon in your head, your average idiot brat isn't really an average idiot anymore..? 




If anything, I'd say this is a boon. Sure there's all the social issue about how only the rich benefit, but that's not a problem with education in shadowrun per se. Some people are born smarter, some people are born with rich parents that can make them smarter.

Being smarter will always matter, because the ones who are smart enough to be competing with the ones rich enough to not be dumb will draw all sorts of scholarships and augmentation grants, giving them access to the same tools.

Think technically we might have manufactured a better idiot with increased memory and attention span which will at least let them bumblefuck their way through the rote learning process, then dad won't have to fork out as much of huge bribe to the college/university in order to get their wastrel through the front gates because they've made it through high school with good grades.

Can't really graft in common sense
Might be able to hardwire AR it with a Bitching Betty simsense setup that just nags them everytime they're about to do something completely stupid...

hmm, reckon there's a market for that one next time someone takes an 'mystery implant' or 'buggy wares'. Heck I know at least one GM that would inflict it on the types of people that play dumb trolls a lot.

There's also the long discussion we had about "Shadow Skools" that I just revived. Check it out.

Agreed with the common sense 


Though I don't see much of a need to bumble through rote learning when you can just swap in a datasoft chip.

Though, with a rich parent, it's likely that you can get a Cerebral Booster 3, which turns any idiot of logic 1 into an above average person at least. Too bad Genetic Optimization doesn't improve the base.

There's also the fun thing above how drugs actually improve your attribute. I wonder if the corps outfit their wageslaves with drugs like Psyche (200nuyen) and Overdrive (150 nuyen). Probably just the top scientists.

Test taking will also be fun. With ware, magic, and drugs available to boost your attributes. Everyone can pretty much show up with an attribute around natural max if not higher. So at this point, I don't think tests will mean much. As long as you can show up to your job with the level of ability you can at tests, who cares if it's from cyber, magic, or otherwise. They can be essentially permanent and they can just fire you whenever your performance fall below what they expect.

Chemical enhancement for long term productivity would not be the kind of stuff we see down at the street level which is cooked up in some bikie's shed in a bathtub and cut with something he found under the sink... then banged up the arm of your nearest migrant worker for fun and profit in the bountiful fields of soy... The nice thing about a corp is-
Get rid of the fillers
Application by a trained doctor for the subjects BMI/tolerance
Cost is virtually that of chemicals and labour once you get rid of middlemen, smuggling, copywrite and packaging
Course you probably want to keep in the addictive qualities because it stops the employee from wandering off to someone else who won't have his chemical of choice. At the most extreme, you could have bioware glands in the subject producing the goods at the bodies own self-regulated levels replacing/substituting the body & brain chemistry, or alternatively a cybernetic injection harness with bio-monitoring built in.
(I'm a fan of the Rifts 'Juicer' )
Downside is movies like an old Sean Connery one from the early 80s called 'Outland' where he's a cop on a lunar mining base and the workers there are balling on super-amphetamines, their productivity is through the roof, but so is the incidence of 'accidents' and 'suicide' as the brain eventually goes to mush. Really good movie, highly recommend it.

As for education purposes, dunno.
Depends on how strict the testing is at the educational facility if they test for drugs like some American companies do, overall we might be looking at education as an industry being completely privatised I'd imagine as most governments seem to try and ignore it in their budgets now, so its probably cheaper for them to outsource, subsidise and let the citizen pick up the tab for going through it. Some facilities would be either apathetic to student enhancement, others which are still a factor might be the religious schools that won't allow it at all. As-is, quite a lot of our schools where I live are either fully or partly private institutions and a large industry unto themselves, still a few public schools but they're not normally the first choice for a parent wanting the best for their kids, for various reasons.

The real thing employers are going to want to see on their prospective employees resume is going to be the gene-tech modifications where a person has been either altered at birth or sometime prior to coming into the market that says-
Physically healthy, no inherited genetic flaws, enhanced mental/physical attributes and a big fat stamp on there of a certified doctor.
That I reckon would be the shoe in with a decent education and result in something of a 'caste' system forming between the unmodified worker and the genetically enhanced. aka Gattaca

Two of the most interesting characters in my campaign are the daughters of a well-off Corporate Psychiatrist and employee of Renraku. He used to work as an interrogator for the Japanese Imperial Army and is a specialist in SIMsense conditioning techniques and memory alteration. Both of his daughters are his attempts to create highly-motivated, super-achieving kids. The eldest, his first attempt, has severe self-image problems endlessly aiming for "perfection". She's a cyber-fetishist who has by this point had every drop of cyberware crammed into her body that she can afford, essence-wise. To get her final limb replaced (the left arm that she despises as being imperfect), she has to get together enough money to go Deltaware. She runs the shadows now under the name Porcelain Doll, taking on jobs so morally black that even other shadowrunners wont touch them. The younger sister had a better job done on her. She's still obsessively focused sometimes, but it's under control. Additionally, her father ramped up the conditioning to make her love him more. Didn't stop her hiring the PCs to off-him, having learnt to set her head above her heart. She's a skilled hacker under the name Elektra Complex, but still only fourteen and a student at Renraku. Their psychological assessments haven't managed to unearth her deep instability. That's the problem with assessing people who know more about psychiatry than you do.

Anyway, just saying that putting your kids through surgery to improve their grades can backfire on you.

K.

Very interesting characters. Though I think that's the difference between doing the best you can for your kids success and using them for your experiments.

If you have enough of a reason to stay useful, even your smart psychologically unstable children won't try to kill you?




On a side note, how did you deal with in-game character knowing about essence and hence that the other arm needs to be deltaware grade before it can be installed? Just curious if it came up.

In my games that´s part of the doctor´s job during diagnostics and planing for a surgical procedure. So an decent doc will be abled to tell their patients what implants are still possible w or w/o customization. Of course the less moraly solid street doc might put in everything he´s payed for and then sell the scraps if the pationt dosn´t survive.

Well the run the PCs were engaged in was basically a run to track down the psychiatrist's shadow bank accounts. He did work on the side for various unpleasant individuals and the PCs had to infiltrate a Yakuza club and bug their accounts systems so that when the psychiatrist transferred a payment to his account with them, they got the information on his shadow account. One of the PCs was masquerading as a traumatised veteran (not far from the truth), fled from the Azzies, seeking help with her traumatic memories. The Johnson (Elektra) provided the seed money and when they handed it over and he made the transfer, they were given the go ahead to kill him. Elektra had already hacked her fathers commlink and his Will. She just needed to know where he'd stashed his black funds before acting. So to respond to your point about staying useful so that your children wont kill you, it helps if you're not very rich and they stand to inherit.

As a side note, the PCs were paid extra to record his death. Elektra intends to watch it in conjunction with SIMs that play positive emotional tracks, thinking it will help her deal with his loss. She should know, right?



Well we avoid talking about Essence unless it's a shaman getting all New Age. Basically, the surgeons have told her that they aren't able to remover her arm without causing complete and probably fatal system shock and damage to her nervous system. There are surgeons in Japan she knows who report they can do it, but all the neural systems on her current limbs / torso are basically one big knot of old tech and if they're going to splice anything more into her nervous system, some of the older stuff is going to have to be updated, not to mention using better bio-substitute components in her limbs for things like blood circulation and immune-system compensation.

If you're interested, her write-up and stats are here and someone kindly did a portrait of her here. It's not quite how I pictured her, but it's a good piece of art and he's got the white, ceramic, sport-look to he cyberlimbs / torso / skull. Note she's wearing her blank "combat" face in the picture (they're changable). Note also the black silk she wears to conceal her "imperfect" arm. I'm going to have a go at drawing her myself sometime. I avoid DMNPCs, but if there were one character that I "get", it would be her.

K.

Just have a contingency plan.