A Shallow Scattering of Deep Thoughts

HEY! Which of you wiseacres did that? Now I owe you big time, and I don't know who I owe the debt to!

*grumble, gripe* Never let it be said that I could ever accept a gift or a compliment graciously . . . but, uh, thanks. *blush*

--

I met with Ms. G today, to discuss the sorry state of the advanced math program. I have confirmed what I suspected from our first day back - she and I have very, very compatible values and beliefs about education, but completely incompatible personal styles. She obviously noticed that I wasn't comfortable with physical contact, was trying not to, and she touched me twice anyway, out of sheer habit. She also came around to the "guest" side of her desk to try and put me at ease, which of course made me all the more nervous. However, she is definitely concerned about the enrollment in the Pre-AP/AP program (across the board - it's not just math having the problem, apparently) and she is very personally supportive of actually having a G/T program, although she admits that it won't fly across the street at the admin building. She's starting a focus group on the whole AP thing later, for both us and the NGC, and I volunteered (of course).

If this isn't just chat, if this actually does something, then I think I can stay.

--

Someone, I believe it was Aristotle, once said that the education that a society gives its youth primarily prepares the young citizens to suit their governmental structure. I suspect it's really the economic structure (they weren't distinguishable in his time, after all). And right now, our economic structure has been changing faster than the educational system has.

The public school system we have now was designed primarily in the 1930s and 1940s, and its role in the economic scheme of thigns was to churn out lots of factory workers, a reasonable number of factory foremen, and a handful of engineers and designers. (Some stuff to also train good mothers was thrown in as an afterthought.) An eighth-grade education was sufficient for a lot of work - farming, coal mining, and so on. It didn't pay to train a kid to think too hard, as that tended, in a factory worker, to lead to union activity. He did need to know how to follow orders, how to interpret orders that weren't entirely clear, how to handle endless repetition of the same work activity, and how to figure out how to use new equipment. Bright kids got co-opted into the ruling class by way of honors classes, college, and the fraternity old-boy network. Really bright kids were a disruption to the system and got shunted into things like the Department of Energy.

How many of my kids will end up in factories? (Well, I suppose if some of the ones with illegal parents go back with them if the Feds bust them . . .) There aren't that many factory jobs left in the US - there's not enough unskilled or semi-skilled labor to go around for the kids who only graduate from high school. Most of what there is is in services rather than brute force labor. We don't offer enough vocational training for the ones who are good enough for skilled blue-collar labor (which is most of them, really - they have to work at being stupid, the vast majority of them). Instead, we assume that either a high-school diploma alone is enough, or that they'll go on to college.

The economy, meanwhile, needs things like skilled database managers. Actually, right now it could probably handle our delaying everyone's graduation for a year to avoid dumping another load of graduates on a saturated job market. However, even assuming it were hiring at a "normal" rate, most of the jobs that pay a living wage require at least an associate's degree or equivalent training, and a different skill set than the one we've been pushing. In an information/energy economy, a worker has to be able to model networks in hir head, to cover multiple activities at once, and to access specific information quickly. If we start teaching towards these specific skills, though, by the time we re-work the system, the economy will have moved on to something even weirder, with a different required skill set.

Education can no longer afford to be directly driven by the economy. If we teach kids to solve problems and develop strategies, to apply whatever knowledge they have, to research effectively and efficiently, and to organize information - in short, how to think - then they'll be both dangerous to the status quo and able to adapt to what the economy wants them to be able to do. How the economy chooses to control or appease them will be up to the captains of industry - there's no justification any more for the educational system doing their dirty work for them.

--

More later . . .

A Shallow Scattering of Deep Thoughts

HEY! Which of you wiseacres did that? Now I owe you big time, and I don't know who I owe the debt to!

*grumble, gripe* Never let it be said that I could ever accept a gift or a compliment graciously . . . but, uh, thanks. *blush*

--

I met with Ms. G today, to discuss the sorry state of the advanced math program. I have confirmed what I suspected from our first day back - she and I have very, very compatible values and beliefs about education, but completely incompatible personal styles. She obviously noticed that I wasn't comfortable with physical contact, was trying not to, and she touched me twice anyway, out of sheer habit. She also came around to the "guest" side of her desk to try and put me at ease, which of course made me all the more nervous. However, she is definitely concerned about the enrollment in the Pre-AP/AP program (across the board - it's not just math having the problem, apparently) and she is very personally supportive of actually having a G/T program, although she admits that it won't fly across the street at the admin building. She's starting a focus group on the whole AP thing later, for both us and the NGC, and I volunteered (of course).

If this isn't just chat, if this actually does something, then I think I can stay.

--

Someone, I believe it was Aristotle, once said that the education that a society gives its youth primarily prepares the young citizens to suit their governmental structure. I suspect it's really the economic structure (they weren't distinguishable in his time, after all). And right now, our economic structure has been changing faster than the educational system has.

The public school system we have now was designed primarily in the 1930s and 1940s, and its role in the economic scheme of thigns was to churn out lots of factory workers, a reasonable number of factory foremen, and a handful of engineers and designers. (Some stuff to also train good mothers was thrown in as an afterthought.) An eighth-grade education was sufficient for a lot of work - farming, coal mining, and so on. It didn't pay to train a kid to think too hard, as that tended, in a factory worker, to lead to union activity. He did need to know how to follow orders, how to interpret orders that weren't entirely clear, how to handle endless repetition of the same work activity, and how to figure out how to use new equipment. Bright kids got co-opted into the ruling class by way of honors classes, college, and the fraternity old-boy network. Really bright kids were a disruption to the system and got shunted into things like the Department of Energy.

How many of my kids will end up in factories? (Well, I suppose if some of the ones with illegal parents go back with them if the Feds bust them . . .) There aren't that many factory jobs left in the US - there's not enough unskilled or semi-skilled labor to go around for the kids who only graduate from high school. Most of what there is is in services rather than brute force labor. We don't offer enough vocational training for the ones who are good enough for skilled blue-collar labor (which is most of them, really - they have to work at being stupid, the vast majority of them). Instead, we assume that either a high-school diploma alone is enough, or that they'll go on to college.

The economy, meanwhile, needs things like skilled database managers. Actually, right now it could probably handle our delaying everyone's graduation for a year to avoid dumping another load of graduates on a saturated job market. However, even assuming it were hiring at a "normal" rate, most of the jobs that pay a living wage require at least an associate's degree or equivalent training, and a different skill set than the one we've been pushing. In an information/energy economy, a worker has to be able to model networks in hir head, to cover multiple activities at once, and to access specific information quickly. If we start teaching towards these specific skills, though, by the time we re-work the system, the economy will have moved on to something even weirder, with a different required skill set.

Education can no longer afford to be directly driven by the economy. If we teach kids to solve problems and develop strategies, to apply whatever knowledge they have, to research effectively and efficiently, and to organize information - in short, how to think - then they'll be both dangerous to the status quo and able to adapt to what the economy wants them to be able to do. How the economy chooses to control or appease them will be up to the captains of industry - there's no justification any more for the educational system doing their dirty work for them.

--

More later . . .

Scattered, Smothered, and Covered in Depth (part 2)

Me doing d-hall duty with only four kids in there, with nothing to keep my brain occupied except an old copy of Harper's, a pen, and a pad of paper, is extremely dangerous.

--

It's in the nature of Idealist generations (I'm using Strauss and Howe's generational nomenclature here) to become more conservative as they age. The Boom is doing this right on schedule, giving us both the Bush-baby and some of the weirdly quasi-conservative clips we've been hearing from some of the Dems recently. Civic generations don't actually get more conservative relative to themselves as they age, but they tend to hold the values they had in their prime for their entire lifespan, so that they do grow more conservative with respect to the rest of the population. Because of this, it's generally assumed that people get more conservative as they age and that this is just a fact of life.

It isn't. Adaptive generations do exactly the opposite - they adopt the views of the Civic generation above them in their youth, and then the views of the Idealist generation below them, which are formed in rebellion against those same Civics, as they age. But no one pays any attention to the Adaptive generations. The current one (the Silent) didn't even get a president. (Is Kerry Silent? I think he is. He's their last, best chance at it, I think.)

Then there's the Reactive generations. We go all over the place. Our values are formed against the backdrop of the Idealist generation above us selling out, so our values are cynical above all else. We tend to swing libertarian rather than straight liberal or straight conservative. And I haven't seen any indication that this changes much as we get older - I was terrified when our social group began reproducing that everyone would turn into conservatives as soon as they had a babe in arms, and it doesn't seem to have happened.

Then there's Gen Y. They're supposed to be a Civic generation, but the Boomers (Idealists) are just as scared of them as they are of us, even though they're mostly their own children. And if W rushes us into the Crisis of 2015 ten years early, it'll still mostly be Gen13ers who take care of it. We Reactives are really bad at that sort of thing (as everyone can see by the current mess - give us a quick war and we can kick ass, but we've got no staying power). They're clearly a different generation, and they seem to have a number of Civic aspects, but they also show Reactive and Adaptive traits, too - they don't know who they are, and the Boomers don't know who Gen Y is, either.

Somebody better figure it out. It'll probably be us. Suck. Doing the Boom's dirty work for them again.

--

The media act as if there is one mind controlling them. Barring some unholy conspiracy between Murdoch, Eisner, and Turner, we know that's not actually true (although it gets uncomfortably closer to being true each decade, it seems). But they still all build an "American" mindset in their consumers, even more than the educational system does, as if they (like the educational system) were intending to do so.

So, short of conspiracy theory, why? I suspect the problem is that the media are their own advertisements. In addition to bearing various commercial messages, they must first and foremost sell themselves, as products, to survive. Therefore, it is in each medium's best interest to mold their consumers into - well, into consumers, and particularly consumers of that medium. The better a medium is at selling itself, the more it seems to end up doing it. TV is very, very good at this, and it seems to be the most, eh, "normi-i-fying" of the popular media. Movies aren't quite so good - it's the limited dosage, I think - and so we sometimes get movies that pay more attention to the story they're telling than to selling film as a product. Radio can get downright tolerable sometimes, although ClearChannel is doing its damnedest to change that. In print, magazines are nothing but ads for themselves (when they aren't ads for TV or movies!), newspaper is a little better at actually delivering content, and books can seem like they're not selling themselves at all (until you look at the dust jacket, at least).

But every medium has at its base the ur-ad for the culture that produced it, because if that culture failed to exist, so would the medium. The culture has to produce and (more importantly) consume the medium for it to continue to exist. A book, a film, or (ha ha) a TV show that actually changed the culture would threaten its own existence - and no meme that wishes its own survival will do such a thing. The Internet showed promise until it got co-opted by AOL and the spammers.

How does a counterculture propagate in such an atmosphere?

Scattered, Smothered, and Covered in Depth (part 2)

Me doing d-hall duty with only four kids in there, with nothing to keep my brain occupied except an old copy of Harper's, a pen, and a pad of paper, is extremely dangerous.

--

It's in the nature of Idealist generations (I'm using Strauss and Howe's generational nomenclature here) to become more conservative as they age. The Boom is doing this right on schedule, giving us both the Bush-baby and some of the weirdly quasi-conservative clips we've been hearing from some of the Dems recently. Civic generations don't actually get more conservative relative to themselves as they age, but they tend to hold the values they had in their prime for their entire lifespan, so that they do grow more conservative with respect to the rest of the population. Because of this, it's generally assumed that people get more conservative as they age and that this is just a fact of life.

It isn't. Adaptive generations do exactly the opposite - they adopt the views of the Civic generation above them in their youth, and then the views of the Idealist generation below them, which are formed in rebellion against those same Civics, as they age. But no one pays any attention to the Adaptive generations. The current one (the Silent) didn't even get a president. (Is Kerry Silent? I think he is. He's their last, best chance at it, I think.)

Then there's the Reactive generations. We go all over the place. Our values are formed against the backdrop of the Idealist generation above us selling out, so our values are cynical above all else. We tend to swing libertarian rather than straight liberal or straight conservative. And I haven't seen any indication that this changes much as we get older - I was terrified when our social group began reproducing that everyone would turn into conservatives as soon as they had a babe in arms, and it doesn't seem to have happened.

Then there's Gen Y. They're supposed to be a Civic generation, but the Boomers (Idealists) are just as scared of them as they are of us, even though they're mostly their own children. And if W rushes us into the Crisis of 2015 ten years early, it'll still mostly be Gen13ers who take care of it. We Reactives are really bad at that sort of thing (as everyone can see by the current mess - give us a quick war and we can kick ass, but we've got no staying power). They're clearly a different generation, and they seem to have a number of Civic aspects, but they also show Reactive and Adaptive traits, too - they don't know who they are, and the Boomers don't know who Gen Y is, either.

Somebody better figure it out. It'll probably be us. Suck. Doing the Boom's dirty work for them again.

--

The media act as if there is one mind controlling them. Barring some unholy conspiracy between Murdoch, Eisner, and Turner, we know that's not actually true (although it gets uncomfortably closer to being true each decade, it seems). But they still all build an "American" mindset in their consumers, even more than the educational system does, as if they (like the educational system) were intending to do so.

So, short of conspiracy theory, why? I suspect the problem is that the media are their own advertisements. In addition to bearing various commercial messages, they must first and foremost sell themselves, as products, to survive. Therefore, it is in each medium's best interest to mold their consumers into - well, into consumers, and particularly consumers of that medium. The better a medium is at selling itself, the more it seems to end up doing it. TV is very, very good at this, and it seems to be the most, eh, "normi-i-fying" of the popular media. Movies aren't quite so good - it's the limited dosage, I think - and so we sometimes get movies that pay more attention to the story they're telling than to selling film as a product. Radio can get downright tolerable sometimes, although ClearChannel is doing its damnedest to change that. In print, magazines are nothing but ads for themselves (when they aren't ads for TV or movies!), newspaper is a little better at actually delivering content, and books can seem like they're not selling themselves at all (until you look at the dust jacket, at least).

But every medium has at its base the ur-ad for the culture that produced it, because if that culture failed to exist, so would the medium. The culture has to produce and (more importantly) consume the medium for it to continue to exist. A book, a film, or (ha ha) a TV show that actually changed the culture would threaten its own existence - and no meme that wishes its own survival will do such a thing. The Internet showed promise until it got co-opted by AOL and the spammers.

How does a counterculture propagate in such an atmosphere?