The Purpose of Education in the United States

[Gooblah]

None of that is true.

Really? All across the board here in Michigan, and I have friends in other states with similar experiences. I think there's a trend coming here.

 

[downtown]

Really? All across the board here in Michigan, and I have friends in other states with similar experiences. I think there's a trend coming here.

The federal government doesn't make curriculum standards, local districts and states do. There hasn't been a huge shift, nationwide, from the system that we've been using for decades, as far as high school credit allocation is going. The system that you described is not the case in the state where I was educated (Ohio), nor in the state where I teach (Louisiana).

 

[downtown]

Because in schools today everyone just pushes the students through. Fail a class? Go to summer school where the only thing you have to do is show up for credit.

A lot of people graduated in my high school class that were morons. I know of one kid that was held back and he just had to take a summer school class to get his diploma.

Then they're not employable in any decent jobs as they have no skills. School should be training for real life. Real life isnt fair. You fail a grade, you take it again next year even though you will older and your friends will move on without you. Too bad.

I worked in a summer school last summer, and in three weeks, I'll be teaching one. I can't speak for every district in every state, but ours wasn't a cakewalk. The expectations were the same as they were for regular school.

As for the guy you know...that makes sense, because you cann't "fail" a grade in high school, only an individual class. He was prob. only missing an English or a Social Studies credit to graduate, so all he would need to do is retake that class.

 

[downtown]

To provide citizen-soldiers who blindly obey authority and who do not even think about questioning it. See how well it is working?

I'm sorry you were picked on in school.

To keep kids busy & off the job market (competing with older adults) as long as possible.

Even if that was true before (which it really wasn't), it is even less true now. Kids wouldn't be able to compete for most American jobs now, because more and more of them are service sector positions that require further training. If you want, you are free to stop schooling your kid once he turns 16 and let him compete...we'll see how well he does.

 

[Shadylookin]

To act as babysitters. There's obviously no standards. I graduated with people who couldn't form a complete sentence. If you fail a class then you just retake it in the summer when the only thing required to pass is attendance. If you're an athlete and fail an exam then they just let you retake the exam. Sometimes the teachers will just pass you just to be rid of you. It's why a high school diploma doesn't mean jack these days

 

[Narz]

Even if that was true before (which it really wasn't), it is even less true now. Kids wouldn't be able to compete for most American jobs now, because more and more of them are service sector positions that require further training. If you want, you are free to stop schooling your kid once he turns 16 and let him compete...we'll see how well he does.

I see you've appointed yourself thread know-it-all. Completely with trolling - "I'm sorry you were picked on in school.".

Most of what's learned in primary school, high school & even college isn't job training. Just because something isn't PC to say doesn't mean it's false. I've beat out 40-year old college graduates for jobs simply because I understand more about computers & the issues the company I applied for would be dealing with. 16-20 years of schooling is excessive & much of it isn't productive.

 

[downtown]

I see you've appointed yourself thread know-it-all.

Yup. I've worked in schools all my life, I studied education policy in college, and now I'm a teacher. I feel very comfortable discussing this topic, because I know it very well.

You're right, K-12 education doesn't have much in the way of specific job training, but it lays the buildings blocks for future job training.

 

[Narz]

Yup. I've worked in schools all my life, I studied education policy in college, and now I'm a teacher. I feel very comfortable discussing this topic, because I know it very well.

All you life? Your working life is what, four years?

Experience doesn't validate biases. MobBoss has been involved with the military for decades but that doesn't mean he's necessarily more objective about it than a detached observed who's studied they military for 10% of as much time.

You're right, K-12 education doesn't have much in the way of specific job training, but it lays the buildings blocks for future job training.

It could lay the building blocks much more efficiently.

I haven't been in school in a decade so I don't know what today's schools are like, mostly I remember learning how to memorize & they forget knowledge very rapidly. I became an expert at this. I remember memorizing all the countries & capitals in Central & South America in twenty minutes. Three days later I could only remember four or five of the capitals.

 

[aelf]

It should be used as a signalling mechanism to determine who gets the best paid jobs.

Ah, but there is a moral hazard there. People might not really bother with acquiring real knowledge and skills as long as they get the cert to signal their ability. Back to asymmetric information.

Your education is what you make of it, really. The job of the state is to provide people with the means to acquire enough skills to live a good (=/= rich) life. That's the technical side. But there should also be personally-motivated learning for the students' own benefit, with guidance and encouragement within the education system.

 

[downtown]

All you life? Your working life is what, four years?

Experience doesn't validate biases. MobBoss has been involved with the military for decades but that doesn't mean he's necessarily more objective about it than a detached observed who's studied they military for 10% of as much time.

I've been working in schools in various capacities (not always instructional) for about seven now. Its the family business in my house. My mother was a guidance counselor, a teacher, and a principal of a traditional school, and an charter school.

It could lay the building blocks much more efficiently.

I'm not arguing that. There are a lot of bad teachers (the one you described should be faulted for developing a shallow assessment),and bad schools. That doesn't mean there is some sort of diabolical conspiracy that you seemed to allege to keep children in school extra long so they can't compete.

 

[Narz]

That doesn't mean there is some sort of diabolical conspiracy that you seemed to allege to keep children in school extra long so they can't compete.

It's not a "diabolical conspiracy", just common sense. Imagine if a revolutionary teaching method was developed to get kids three years ahead of the current curve (so that'd be, on average, learning 8th grade math in 5th grade, etc.). They'd be out of high school by 14-15 & out of college, ready to compete with adults by 18-19. The already stretched thin job market wouldn't be able to accommodate.

Same thing would happen if all American troops overseas suddenly returned home or all petty criminals (say non-violent drug offenders) were suddenly set free.

The goal is a quality school is to prepare kids for the world as it is & to create a better one but the goal of a run-of-the-mill inner city school is just to minimize truancy & have a reasonably high graduation rate.

Ideally (IMO) schools should not be buildings where children are isolated with their peers & a few teachers to learn canned curriculums but more integrated into the whole of society, how that should/could be done, I don't know, I haven't given it much thought, I do think kids should start thinking about employment waaay earlier. I didn't start seriously thinking about what I could realistically do until my 2nd year of college, I looked at all the majors, couldn't figure out how I was going to make money with any of them, got overwhelmed & dropped out. Had I thought about this, had classes on this earlier it might have not been such a shock to me. Granted my last completed grade in public HS was 9th (my schooling after that was in "alternative" schools which I'm sure were inferior in quality to even your average public high school, still I've helped kids with their homework since then & from what I've seen 11th & 12th grade aren't THAT revolutionarily different from 9th, as they should be, IMO).

 

[Formaldehyde]

I'm sorry you were picked on in school.

And I'm sorry you feel the need to engage in absurd ad hominem attacks like this instead of even trying to argue the issues.

 

[downtown]

It's not a "diabolical conspiracy", just common sense. Imagine if a revolutionary teaching method was developed to get kids three years ahead of the current curve (so that'd be, on average, learning 8th grade math in 5th grade, etc.). They'd be out of high school by 14-15 & out of college, ready to compete with adults by 18-19. The already stretched thin job market wouldn't be able to accommodate.

Its just a hypothetical, because such a teaching method doesn't exist. Some kids are academically mature enough to master everything that quickly, and they complete high school early via the internet, or can take PSEOs. Preparation for college/other learning isn't just about mastering facts or certain academic concepts. Its also about academic and personal maturity and life skills, and that takes time.

But its moot, since there isn't a teaching method that, when employed correctly, would make everybody basically skip three grades.

And I'm sorry you engage in absurd ad hominem attacks like this instead of even trying to argue the issues.

I missed the part where I turn all the kids into robots in teacher training. Why don't you elaborate on your little one liner a bit more?

 

[Formaldehyde]

So you consider the majority of the US population voting for reactionary idiots 4 out of the last 8 elections, and advocating torture to be a crowning achievement of your illustrious career?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502901.html

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

 

[downtown]

So you consider the majority of the US population voting for reactionary idiots to be a crowning achievement of your illustrious career?

They don't have anything to do with each other. It certainly isn't the "purpose" of the education system.

 

[Narz]

Its just a hypothetical, because such a teaching method doesn't exist. Some kids are academically mature enough to master everything that quickly, and they complete high school early via the internet, or can take PSEOs.

But come on, a large portion of what school is is a social testing ground. Kids that leave early are missing out on this & very few of them will want to. Kids don't want to seem different from their peers, even extraordinarily so (especially in academics) so very few will go that route.

Preparation for college/other learning isn't just about mastering facts or certain academic concepts. Its also about academic and personal maturity and life skills, and that takes time.

Maturity & life skills coming via experience. In general kids who have to work instead of going to college are going to be much more mature within two years that college kids after two years of school.

But its moot, since there isn't a teaching method that, when employed correctly, would make everybody basically skip three grades.

Like I said, if there were such a method, it wouldn't be applicable within the current school system anyway because no kid wants to leave their friends behind. Teachers in schools as they exist today have to cater to the lowest common denominater. I knew fifth grade math by age seven but that didn't stop me from having to sit in three extra years of math class while the teacher spent hours trying to explain to the dumbest kid how decimals worked.

 

[Formaldehyde]

They don't have anything to do with each other..

Of course they do. A nation which can't even be bothered to read a book and that despises intellectualism and idolizes stupidity is obviously not one that can select reasonable leadership at least half the time, as evidenced by the last 8 elections.

It certainly isn't the "purpose" of the education system.

Yet that is exactly what has happened. Who should we blame but the public school teachers and the parents for failing the nation as a whole?

 

[Kerozine]

I'm not arguing that. There are a lot of bad teachers (the one you described should be faulted for developing a shallow assessment),and bad schools. That doesn't mean there is some sort of diabolical conspiracy that you seemed to allege to keep children in school extra long so they can't compete.

There are no bad teachers; only glorified nannies.

Those who actually teach something, well, .

 

[Azale]

Of course they do. A nation that can't even be bothered to read a book is obviously not one that can select reasonable leadership.

What are you talking about? I know it sounds more clever in your head, but I don't think anyone is following you. Are you saying that most Americans don't have functional literacy? Or because they don't elect your favorite politicians, they are stupid?

I would like for Americans to read more, but the whole idea that the nation is some "idiocracy" is kinda overblown when you consider the level of educational diffusion in decades past.

Should we go back to some kind of limited suffrage? Landowners with a college degree and a sufficient number of pegs to the left on the political compass? I mean, isn't it up to the American people to decide what its "reasonable leadership"? I don't think I should have to elucidate how well read/educated the American people of the 1930's were who voted for Franklin Roosevelt as compared to now.

The elitist card is something often played by Democracy's greatest enemies. - Ray Romano

Yet that is exactly what has happened. Who should we blame but the public school teachers and the parents for failing the nation as a whole?

Ok so...these radical reactionaries you talk about...I'm guessing you're talking about Reagan Reagan Bush Bush. Do you really think Carter was going to win an election in 1980? Reagan was not as "reactionary" as you paint him, if you consider what the hell he was supposed to be reacting against. He wasn't the Franco to Carter's glorious Republic. Also, do you mean to say that everyone who contributed to the electoral beatdown of 1984 were brainless mind slaves of the Amerikkkan educational machine created by THE MAN? I think Mondale was just a lame candidate.

I would also venture to say that sometimes populaces make the wrong decision, as was the obvious case with Bush. But hey, people voted Benyamin Netanyahu, Silvio Burlesconi (three times), and Stephen Harper into office...mistakes happen. That is why we have term limits and democracy (with full suffrage!) now. But I'm sure the Italians, Canadians, and Israeli people are all just unwilling puppets of THE MAN.

 

[GoodGame]

What are the reasons for this? How do we fix this? What is the true purpose of education? Should it be the production of the model citizen, the model worker, or the model intellectual?

I think these questions are the right ones to ask. I find it humorous that international PhD applicants are trying to bang down the doors to get into American programs, yet we have gaps at the lower levels of education, when compared to less prosperous countries.

I think the Federal government is responsible preventing 'brain drains' to an extent, especially when such avoids economic stagnation, but Federal funding should be primarily aimed at grooming all citizens to be good citizens, be literate, and have employable skills. Other levels of government, and parents, can voluntarily tackle higher standards.