A Shallow Scattering of Deep Thoughts
Jan. 7th, 2004 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaHEY! 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 . . .
*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 . . .
