Preface to the Education Dilemma

View 778 Friday, June 21, 2013

SUMMER SOLSTICE

The longest Day of the Year

Actually for Californians the moment of solstice was last night. Tonight will be the brightest Full Moon of the year. Go have a look. I don’t think it matters to werewolves. Though. Full moon is full moon…

I have been gathering information for my education reform piece, but the deeper I get into the miasma that education has become, the more I realize that before there can be actual reform there needs to be some recognition of the problem – and that we are due to lose a lot of children to this monster before anything can be done. I’ve also been working on suggestions as to what parents can do to save their kids.

As Charles Murray observed in his Coming Apart (http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-America-1960-2010-ebook/dp/B00540PAXS/ref=tmm_kin_title_0 and see also Murray’s talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBxqDTA0hc4 ) in many places it is not so apparent that we are in an educational mess. The ruling classes mostly live in their own small worlds, and they don’t see the problems. Fairfax County Virginia may notice that the schools aren’t quite as good as they used to be – at least those who have lived there a while will. There are problems, but they aren’t so acute as they are for the rest of the world. On the other hand, the disastrous No Child Left Behind – which meant No Child Will Ever Get Ahead – policies imposed on most of America have had and are having terrible effects. Other ‘reforms’ have been equally ineffective.

Of course all this thrashing about is a misguided attempt to pay attention to the 1983 Commission on education headed by Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, which famously concluded that “If a foreign country had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.” This produced a flurry of top down actions dictated across the nation, most of which, by the time the bureaucrats and unions had got through with them, made things worse.

The Golden Age of American education came back when the question of “Federal Aid to Education” was an actual political topic, and there was no massive Federal Aid to education. American schools were run by mostly local school boards, and the school boards were elected by the local taxpayers who paid for the schools. The result was a mixture, of course, with some schools being starved of funds while others had plenty of money but it was not well spent, but overall it worked quite well. In a few places like Los Angeles where the schools were consolidated into enormous districts of hundreds of schools the system was so large that the only controls were bureaucratic, and the school boards were professional politicians, but by and large local communities got the schools they wanted and deserved.

But meanwhile the experts and bureaucrats were growing more powerful. The Cold War presumably showed our schools inferior to the Communist schools of Russia and the Captive Nations. A cry went up for Federal Aid to the schools, and the long and successful tradition of resistance to Federal and even State control of the local schools was defeated. Money came in, and with the money came bureaucratic control, and that mean ‘credentials’. It was no longer possible for a local school board to hire a teacher because the board considered a retired military officer qualified to teach high school history, or a local educated housewife facing an empty nest to become the fifth grade teacher. Everyone had to have credentials, and the credentials could only be granted by increasingly expensive colleges of education, and the disasters became worse.

Everyone knows that standards at colleges of education are not high compared to the other departments on campus. Getting credentials requires a lot of effort and even some work, but what it learned in an education department course on teaching a subject is small compared to what would have been learned has the prospective teacher taken a course on the same subject from the English, or mathematics, or history department at the same university. If you don’t know this, go to any nearby college and ask the first twenty people you meet which is the least difficult department.

So the prospective teacher graduates as an indentured servant, owing a debt that will take years to repay and possibly will never be paid, and which cannot be avoided even by bankruptcy. It reminds me of the Soviet Union, which had “free” education, but anyone who had partaken of it was refused permission to emigrate because they owed the state for that education.

I am rambling because I really hadn’t intended to write an essay but rather explain some of what I am doing just now. I haven’t been terribly active this week and there’s a reason.

If you are happy with the schools we have then what I am working on will not be of much use; but for those who see just where our school system is taking us, it might be important.

But before we analyze the school system and try to see what can be done to save it, we first need to identify the really critical groups at risk.

First and foremost are the bright children in a hopeless school from which there is no escape. There are a lot of them.

The second group in the most danger are children of normal intelligence, who are going to be sent to college because they learn nothing useful in high school, and will graduate from college with huge debts and few to zero marketable skills. These are the kids who ought to grow up to be the middle class that governs America: as Aristotle noted, the best government is government by the middle class, the middle class being defined as those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation. Note that this group includes what used to be called skilled workers.

All of which bring us to a controversial point: I am assuming that most of my readers understand that equal education for everyone is expensive, counterproductive, and impossible. The attempt to do it inevitably bring on bad results

This objective truth conflicts with the American ideal of treating everyone equally, and of course has been used as an excuse for arbitrary discrimination, and might be so used again. The fact remains that not everyone will benefit from a university education. Not everyone can benefit from a college education. When we get down to community college – what used to be called junior college – level the question is different: of those who should not go to college or university, how many must go to junior college only because the high schools are so awful? Will more benefit from expanding the junior colleges, or reforming the high schools?

These are the questions to address as citizens.

There is also the question of what to do now? If you are the parent of children in need of an education, what must you do? Clearly they can’t be neglected while waiting for this system, so bad that had it been imposed on us by a foreign power we would rightly consider it an act of war, is dismantled and rebuilt?

I invite comments.