December 30, 2004
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topic: help me solve this inherent contradiction
I’m a school critic. I think schools are inherently bad to both the development of compassoinate people, as well as to the development of life-long learners, informed thinkers, etc. etc. People do learn in schools, however, most modern schools, in my opinion, are not built in the most efficient way to provide those things that we intend. For example, the push to get more and more students to go to college is also tied with the fact that college for most of those who are going is merely an economic tool to get access to certain jobs. I would argue that in most cases, colleges fail to develop truly “educated citizens,” as they’re supposed to do.
So…there’s the inherent contradiction. Schools are good in the sense that we need the degrees they give in order to have financial success in life. Since that is the case, I believe that we need to help the poor gain access to schools in order to have access to those financial tools. At the same time, in many cases we are providing funding to put people into schools that are simply not in a position to develop students in a healthy way both personally and intellectually.
But…here’s another twist. So long as tax money goes towards education in its various forms, the people and the gov’t, will want to know, “how well is this money being spent.” These has lead to the accountability movement, which views schools as a business investment. Instead of profits, we look at test scores, which inherently leads to inadequate education because test scores have a negative effect on learning and passion to learn.
I met a libertarian when I was bussing the country this fall. A very knowledgable and pleasant person. His view of politics, “anything big that is run by gov’t is bound to fail.” I thought about that over and over, and thinking about education, I see how it’s true. Government schools, so long as they are required to teach as they have for 100 years, are bound to fail to provide the best education possible.
The best schools, are those that don’t test. thatliberalmedia despite my initial misunderstandings, (which is natural in xangaland when people you’ve never met come in an throw a wrench in your thinking, or make statements that bring with them many beliefs about that person) made me think further about the role of government. The thing is, funding for schools is a double-edged sword, public schools are both necessary to ensure the poorest are able to go to school (which is good for them job-wise), while simultaneously providing those people with an education that is inherently substandard (because, by it’s nature, public schooling needs to be held accountable through testing).
Topic: politics in general
Ugh…what’s the lesson of 2004. The first lesson was how divided we are. But, the bigger lesson was how little we understand the other side. I’ve recently found my niche as a social democrat, but I think inherent in just about any political ideal are flaws. Honestly…I think we’re fucked anyway you look at it. Someone posted a comment on dara’s site, that we’re idealists when we’re young because we don’t have to worry about making money or paying the bills. Then reality kicks in. The reality is, in 50, 100, 200, years, we’re still going to be having these conversations. Was there was 1000 years ago. Yup. Poverty. Yup. Inequality. Yup. Is there less war, poverty, inequality, than there was 1000 years ago. I don’t think so. Despite our incredible technological advances, is there any reason to believe that in 1000 years we still won’t be facing the problems of poverty, war, and inequality? Nope.
I once read this book by Edward de Bono, the guy who coined the term, “lateral thinking.” As long as our fundamental views of the world remain the same, nothing will change. It’s the radical, out-of-the box ideas that change things, and no culture has ever been built on continuously viewing things radically. A lateral thinking culture would say, “we want to educate the poor, but we want schools w/out tests and grades, what can we do?”
The comment about being an idealist really hits hard, not just becaue my time is now consumed with worrying about making a dollar, but, because I realize how every generation thinks this is the one that will bring about a utopian society. And, part of the reason we believe that is our simplistic view of the world. I want to throw a wrench in the minds of every child and say, “by the way, over 100,000 people just died from a tsunami. Now there’s millions living in grief, and in conditions that will probably kill many more. So…when you start thinking about how you can improve the world, don’t forget that there’s one more problem in the world to deal with.”
My old supervisor said one of the most complimenting things to me yesturday, before taking it back. He said, “I was thinking about what you said, [about being a famous 23-year old school critic] and I thought, maybe you are the one. Maybe you don’t need to be an old professor to criticize school. The internet was a 1 in a million thing, started by a young person…but, not to take anything away from you, I don’t think you’re that person.” OUCH…I thought, but he’s right. I believe deep I won’t be the 1 in a million to revolutionize education, however, tell a young athlete they’ll never win a gold medal.
I was watching swimming the other day…to spend your whole life trying to be the best swimmer. It’s simultaneously silly, to make a life out of swimming and to probably never meet your goal, as well as inspiring and wonderful, to do something you love and to strive for something seemingly unattainable. I guess that’s my take on life, you get one shot, why not try something ridiculous with it, something fun and adventurous.
Life has become this double world of external and internal reality. Neither THE world, nor MY world, makes very much sense. Reading about history and politics has helped me grapple a bit w/ the external world, perhaps some advice on literature pertaining to the internal world. (i think learning more about buddhism/taoism will ground my thoughts in something bigger).
Comments (5)
As much as I hate to sound tacky and quote Hillary Clinton—it does take a village to raise a child. I started out a product of an inner city public school system in NYC. I’m talking the ghetto—as in white and Asian students literally stood out in a crowd and there would be stabbings and shoot outs. Then I moved on to a middle-class public school–also in NYC. O have NYC friends who are now high school teachers in urban schools in the NYC area–sometimes the problem isn’t that public schools are at fault–parents aren’t involved. Kids don’t care and the teachers can’t do their jobs if the kids are uncooperative. It’s worse in urban schools where kids threaten bodily harm to teachers. Kids who wish to learn are hindered from that experience whether they’re in a public school system or private school system if they’re in an environment where they are pressured by peers to perform below capacity.
I knew classmates who were pregnant at 13. Kids who died when I just saw them in seventh grade art class the day before.
The issue with public school and anything which deals with social reform is that we fail to realize that young people are involved–and with young people comes volatile emotions. It’s why big government doesn’t work. It’s why we need to evaluate per community rather than rely on general test scores. Parents have to get involved. Teachers need to care harder although most times if the parents themselves never get involved but expect good end results. In my opinion, there’s no one good or bad solution.
Especially in this day and age–our kids are raised by TV and the internet. Look at how many pre-teens and teenagers are on Xanga. There needs to be an equal amount of grassroots effort from the community in addition to better involvement from parents so that whatever little amount of funding trickles out from government can be utilized to the maximum capacity.
College education is highly overrated though–but once again, even with college, you only learn as much as you want to. I went to a private college. I paid for my tuition. My parents wanted me to appreciate the value of a dollar so I had pretty much worked since I was in high school. So for me by the time I was a freshman in college, I was already writing my own checks and I viewed college as a service which I pay for–where I have to perform to get my money’s worth. I saw dollar signs and the decline of my checking account at every turn. If I missed a 45 minute class, that was $70 down the drain. If the teacher was late or didn’t show up, I’d be furious that I wasn’t learning and that my money was going down the drain. If grown college kids who treated college as a party and schoolwork as “homework” wanted to socialize with me and copy off me, I became extremely defensive because the bottom line was I was paying for my tuition and once money is involved—it’s no longer fun and games.
Even colleges–most kids don’t learn and don’t feel that they learned because people grow at different rates and even as seniors, there are college students who have yet to learn responsibilities who treat college as “school” and they don’t realize that even though that degree will gather dust, they need it because it determines their entire future–how much they’ll earn. Which companies will hire them dependent on how good they look on paper versus whether they come from the best schools.
There are plenty of college kids who go to school for a university degree but they leave knowing as much as they knew when they came in four years ago–because they refuse to grow up.
It’s not a black and white issue where one is better than the other and one is a viable solution but not the other–you have to realize that when you’re dealing with people, you don’t have control because no matter how easy the solution seems on paper or in theory, getting people to cooperate is extremely hard. It’s why no matter how many peace ambassadors are sent to war torn countries, most often, countless lives are thrown away all for the ego of the men in power. Look at Sudan. Still suffering swarms of locusts. Look at the Ivory Coast. When you’re dealing with extremely sensitive issues which are dependent on cultural norms/ economic and social background/ gender/ sexual orientation/ a person’s capacity for learning…etc… you can’t trust that people do as the plan projects but you hope that they do what they are expected to so things fall into place as planned. But it’s not–because people are the most unpredictable. This is why education plans aren’t foolproof. For why even in a developing country like the US, AIDS and HIV incidence rates are on the rise. Why there are Americans who haven’t a clue what Eritrea is or what its relation to Ethiopia is. Why American math scores and American students’ capacity in mathematics are below that of other nations.
For me, as a strong advocate of the good that public school can achieve–provided there still exists teachers who were as passionate and innovative with teaching techniques as the ones I had–who made a $5 bag of potato latkes and a 35 cent carton of milk into a one day class project for 35 about other cultures and about basics like turning milk into cream –or teachers who literally stood on their heads to engage students. I was reading Shakespeare at the age of nine and my teacher introduced me to modern poetry and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Then I’ve had teachers in college who simply didn’t care, who assumed that the kids were failures anyway and who did it for the sake of a paycheck and a tenured job–and it showed on the students’ performance and then ultimately on the grades. And this was a private university.
Without the eclectic uniqueness of my NYC public school education, I’d be an accountant. Maybe it’s different in other places but my public school teachers utilized all that NYC offered–they networked with museums, coordinated with college for art and dance programs, if we were unreceptive–they ”wowed” us into eager kids–they networked with local media organizations—and in effect it kept kids off the streets and in workshops and programs where we got to meet and be mentored by the people who would influence us–book editors and typographers from Rolling Stone magazine, from newspapers, from book publishing, from websites, war reporters from the NY Times, the first website team for when MTV.com was launched, artists, writers, art directors, fashion designers, museum trustees– hence grassroot effort. I just remember those workshops where each adult took the time to tell us their story–from how they decided this was their calling to how they actualized those dreams and what they advise of us–including what career fields are expected to grow in the media. Things like teachers going out of their way to get their high school students to intern at the Whitney Museum–which gives valuable work experience, establishes responsibility in kids, and looks good on college applications. Or competing in Junior Art Director’s Club advertising competitions where kids got a feel of what an actual real world boardroom presentation feels like–and it also exposed public school kids like me to life outside NYC out of the urban jungle.
Regardless of how much money or lack of money you get for public education from tax dollars–in the end, these are kids and kids need love, the realization that there are people who want them to grow and pursue even dreams which seem unattainable, and regardless of how much govt. funding a public school gets, it’s a grassroot effort between parental involvement, community, peers, the school, and the teachers–and building networks and social awareness.
I guess I want to start by suggesting a couple of things (and I’ll probably handle a bunch of this over a few comments):
(a) It is almost always a matter of resources: This is obvious. Despite the moronic repetitions of the right, “throwing money at problems” almost always works, assuming the money is sufficient. So, if public school teachers were paid the way stockbrokers are schools could pick from among the very best teachers. If schools had enough money to have classes of 15 students or less, education would radically change for the better. This is so obvious it can’t be denied. The reason, for example, that St. John’s College (in Annapolis and Santa Fe) is consistently listed among the best college’s in the country, is that it costs a lot to go there, and as a result education is a combination of individual one-on-one study and small group seminars. The reason top “non-public” schools do well is the reason that education works brilliantly in rural Vermont and rural Nebraska. Those on-room schoolhouses with multi-age classes of five to fifteen work, and if we could do that everywhere, students’ lives would change. Imagine combining that with the diversity and resources (natural to New York City, expensive elsewhere) that PostModerna describes above. Imagine combining it with free higher education as Germany does (as New York City and California did when the groups to be helped were Caucasion Eurotypes). There’s a simple truth here, if we quadrupled the amount we spent on education everything in the nation would improve. And we could if we’d re-do our tax policies to encourage the kind of things any decent society would want to encourage.
(b) What does government help and when does it hurt? Well, you just have to look around. For example, every nation in Europe, plus Canada, has a better health care system than we do. Every single one. Do not listen to right-wing lies. The American health care system is only superior if you are super rich, but if you are super rich, the Saudi health care system, hell, the Venezuelan health care system is great. The US is the only NATO country where people die simply because they don’t have money. The only NATO country not to make preventative care a priority. The only NATO country where Viagra is easier to get than blood pressure medication. The only NATO country where health care is not routine for all children. And consequently, the only NATO country where “health care administration” sucks down over 1/3 of all health care dollars (compare this even with US Medicaid, with a 14% overhead). So obviously health care should be a single system with regional price variations. This isn’t just a “rights” issue or a “health” issue, it’s a competitiveness issue. Ontario will top Michigan in auto production in 2005 almost exclusively because it is cheaper to build cars in Canada and pay Canadian taxes, than it is to provide American workers with health care ALMOST as good as Canadians get.
Obviously transportation as well. We waste billions because we’re the only country with private railroads. Even the military: current reports point out that the US military under Cheney/Rumsfeld is paying double to get services through Halliburton that they would have had they kept these services “in house.” Even skipping the obvious corruption, privatization has cost a ton. More later…
(c) Does giving poor people money hurt them? Oh God, do not listen to someone like thatliberalmedia. Of course it doesn’t. You need to see this from George W. Bush’s and thatliberalmedia’s perspective: That is, they absolutely need a fatally-poor underclass in order to advance their agenda, everything from breaking unions and Mexicanizing American wages to fighting their Imperial Wars (in my first battles with thatliberalmedia he insisted he was “too valuable” to go to Iraq and die, but for others this was a good economic choice). Thus the poor must be both visible and so miserable that there is both an “I’ll work for anything” mentality and an “I’ll join the Army desperation.” What cripples the poor? The lack of the (originally pushed by Bobby Kennedy) “Negative Income Tax,” which would guarantee that the more you earn the more you have. The fact that working 40 hours at minimum wage will not get you out of poverty. The need (finally in-part remedied by Clinton) to stay on Medicaid because we don’t have National Health Insurance. The lack of affordable housing for the lower middle class. The FICA tax on the first $10,000 in earnings which robs from the poor and blocks entry-level hiring by raising costs for small employers. FICA in general because it makes it cheaper for companies to pay executives than increase hiring. The tax structure in general which taxes work more than rich people cashing in on Wall Street gambling. A lack of salary ratio rules for publically-traded corporations that lets Wal-Mart executives get obscenely rich while keeping their employees in poverty. An incredible lack of public transportation in most areas. Honestly, there are more sophisticated formulas, but there’s nothing in Huey Long’s income redistribution plan I wouldn’t vote for if the dollar amounts were adjusted for inflation. Once again, actually attempt to “throw money at them” before letting some rich fool tell you that won’t work. Just look what “throwing money at him” did for a lazy, not too bright, serial failure named George W. Bush.
Well, you’re covering several things here, but first of all about education I’ll say that when I had my first year of college at Reed in Portland, Oregon, it gave me so much classic liberal education about so many things that that one year has enriched the rest of my life since just by showing me such a broader-horizoned world – and the kicker was they didn’t give grades at Reed (except when you had to take a transcript with you somewhere else). I think this kind of experience is probably pretty rare these days though.
As for whether we’ll always have war and poverty no matter what, I can’t buy that it has to be that way but one thing to keep in mind is that today’s wars are fought with such devastasting weapons that we may never see that 1000 years from now scenario.
Dan, I think there is an assumption you are using for your argument, that is subtly omitted which is that, higher education should not be vocational – training people for jobs. That’s why I went to school and why most of us did. When I want to get educated about philosophy or religion or even math or science, I will buy a book, or take it from the library and learn – and learn what I want to learn. I got higher educated so that I could use the material for which i was educated to perform a job, a service to society. Perhaps, that service does not require all 4 years of my bachelors and 1 year of my masters, but i am now amply prepared to offer skills for which i get paid. I think it is fine if people choose to take less pragmatic courses or majors in school, and typically from what I have seen, that information is very educational for the sake of educational. Should people be required to take less pragmatic courses, i don’t think so. Should they have the ability - yes. Should most colleges call themselves vocational schools – probably, but who cares, that’s getting hung up in the details. A great example of the difference of vocational higher education to “pure” higher education is a medical major. Do people go to medical school to have a full and complete understanding of how humans work? What makes us tick? How to help people? How about… how to make money do all of those things? You see, medical school is both vocational higher education and “pure” higher education. Regardless, people need doctors and a medical educational provides a lot of knowledge – people must just concentrate solely on this profession, no philosophy (except perhaps on spare time). Grades are important – they can not get Ds. Would you want Dr. operating on you when he failed surgery 101, was mediocre in 102 and opted to take Shakespeare insteaad of advanced surgery. Now i know that example gets a bit absurd, but i think it does a fair job of highlighting my point.
Additionally, i think that the difference between vocational higher education and “pure” higher education is that 100 years ago, higher education was far more of a luxury, most not beign about to partake. The types of jobs that existed were far fewer - there were no bankers 200 years ago. So that education really could provide a diverse cross-section of knowledge. That is not the case now. A great example is electrical engineering. For an EE to create anything relatively important, he/she must prob. have a bachelors, masters and PHD in EE. This is because there is so much to learn, that one would not know enough to do anything novel. The point is he/she could not receive such a high level of education without excelling (grades) in all the classwork that comprised his/her majors.
Regardless, I’ll leave with this, do you think you should perhaps modify your argument to be against vocational schools? Or perhaps that vocationals schools and higher education should be distinct? Just btw, higher education by your explanation, should not even have a degree, b/c if you are learning for the sake of learning who cares about that paper. If you do care, get a vocational degree. The catch is, if you dont’ care about the piece of paper, you can do what Will Hunting suggested in Good Will Hunting, “Get a $120,000 education for $1.50 in late charges from the public library.”
Food for thought and Happy New Year. Regardless of all of these discussions it’s nice everyone to happy and have a party, we’ve got a ton to celebrate.
usyjustin: you make a good distinction but probably use the wrong example: one of the things that makes many doctors terrible caregivers is their complete lack of liberal arts educations. No one needs a higher level of human knowledge than someone attempting diagnosis through communication.
I think we are confused. Because our high schools have become worthless “college prep” centers, vocational education is left to the post-secondary world. Because trade associations like to restrict competition, ever higher “qualifications” are placed on jobs that shouldn’t need college at all. Because we don’t see ourselves connected with the future, the natural human way of learning – the apprenticeship- has been allowed to die out.
For the past 150 years there have been two higher ed models: The liberal arts university model (the broadest range of knowledge mixed with a slight level of specialization in a “major”) and the “land-grant” model (Michigan State being the originator in 1855), where heavy specialization (vocational training if you will) is mixed with a lesser level of broad understanding. In the liberal arts university model specialization of the vocational level was saved for Masters programs (hence the term: “Masters”). I think there’s room for both, just as I think there’s room for the New York City High School Model (decide your career in 8th grade) and other choices.
Still, I’m sorry, but most of us don’t have the brains of Will Hunting. You go to great universities not for the books (available anywhere these days) or even the profs (there are great profs everywhere) but for the mix of students and ideas that expose you to the greater world. If you only go to college to prep for a job most likely you’ll be mediocre at best at your job, and completely unprepared for what the future of your job holds. The problem with straight “vocational education” is that no one has the slightest idea of what jobs will exist ten years from now or what those jobs will be like. Want to go to school to become a linotype operator? A telegraph guy? A punch card programmer? A Freudian therapist?
So you go to college to learn about the planet and about how to keep learning. You hone your questioning skills in a variety of ways, learn the complexities of history so you can be a decent citizen, and you discover the range of human possibility.
I’m the product of “vocational-type” schools – both Michigan State and the New York City Police Academy (SUNY) – but both were devoted to a wide concept of inquiry, which is the heart of the liberal education Dan thinks is important. I’d argue that, despite what “many students” think, that is more important than ever.