The Education Factor
Oct. 27th, 2011 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eliskimo[Author's Note: My other two posts since joining Dreamwidth have been medieval in nature. This one is not. Hope that doesn't throw anybody for a loop. I decided to crosspost from my LiveJournal.]
The recent Occupy protests got me thinking yesterday about education. One of the things that has come up is the high cost of post-secondary education, but also the difficulty (perceived or actual) of a) obtaining meaningful work in North America without a degree and b) the difficulty of obtaining work that will actually allow a student to repay the debt incurred to earn the degree once they graduate (I've posted about this before). Of course, there is the photograph circulating on social media sites of the student who claims s/he is not part of "the 99%" because s/he will graduate debt-free (after obtaining a whooping 90% undergraduate scholarship, lucky duck), but that doesn't really address the situation of most people.
What got me thinking was someone's blog post which included the assertion that the days of Ralph Kramden, when a young man could graduate from high school and go directly into a job he could expect to keep, with appropriate advancement, for the next 30 or so years, are gone. This begs the question as to where the failure is. What if it is not with the post-secondary educational system, but with the secondary?
A friend this evening posted on her Facebook a little bit of satire I've seen before:
Teachers' hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It's time we put thing in perspective and pay them for what they do - babysit! We can get that for minimum wage. That's right. Let's give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:...00 PM with 45 min off for lunch and plan-- that equals 6 1/2 hours). Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that's $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations. LET'S SEE.... That's $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year. Wait a minute -- there's something wrong here! There sure is! The average teacher's salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student--a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!
Thing is, I think too many people on this continent -- particularly in the nation in the middle -- DO treat school as a babysitting service. Oh, they wouldn't call it that, of course, but the expectation is that that is just where kids go without any real expectation of what they get out of it. It's ingrained in the mass culture. Think of just about any movie or TV show about high school students. The school is most often just a backdrop for the "real" events of the kids lives. If there is any emphasis on the learning it's generally only in terms of earning good enough grades to get into college. That's where real learning/training takes place. My Dad told me once that he had a relative tell him not to waste his time taking a foreign language in high school, since he'd just have to do it in college anyway. It's not a new attitude.
But what if we as a culture changed the way we look at high school? What if high school was where Real World learning occurred? Obviously, some students would still be bound for post-secondary education, but if the option were there, students could be prepared to enter the workforce without incurring huge debt to do so ... and work more than a McJob. It's doable. Certain of my Italian friends are sure to correct my impression of Italian education (I was on the outside looking in), but the one thing that really struck me about it was that students made a choice in middle school as to what general direction their careers would take and choose their secondary education accordingly. At 14 a student can choose either a university-bound path by entering a "Lyceum", or a track that will prepare them to start looking for work as soon as they graduate by entering an "Institute". There are different, specialized Lyceums: Classical (with an emphasis on language, history and philosophy), Scientific (with an emphasis on the maths and sciences) and Humanities (with an emphasis on the social sciences and teaching). There are also different Institutes: Technical and Professional primarily, which teach a variety of specialized tracks like computer science and business administration.
To adopt this kind of high school division would take a major shift in attitude in North America, but the existence of VoTechs and specialized art high schools demonstrate that the general idea is already accepted on some level. I know there would be people who claim 13 and 14 year olds aren't capable of making life decisions, but frankly our current system contributes to the delayed maturity and prolonged adolescence that many acknowledge is a real problem in our society. There are others who would lament the end of the community cohesiveness that a shared high school experience provides, but that is also already cracking with the proliferation of magnet schools within the public system, charter, private, and parochial schools outside of it, and of course, the dramatic rise in home schooling.
Regardless, a change in high school that expects to turn out students with real skills to enter their adult lives would be a step in the right direction that addresses at least this one large Occupy concern ... although it would probably cost a lot in the short term, which would annoy the Tea Party. Still, I don't think the status quo is really working for us anymore.
The recent Occupy protests got me thinking yesterday about education. One of the things that has come up is the high cost of post-secondary education, but also the difficulty (perceived or actual) of a) obtaining meaningful work in North America without a degree and b) the difficulty of obtaining work that will actually allow a student to repay the debt incurred to earn the degree once they graduate (I've posted about this before). Of course, there is the photograph circulating on social media sites of the student who claims s/he is not part of "the 99%" because s/he will graduate debt-free (after obtaining a whooping 90% undergraduate scholarship, lucky duck), but that doesn't really address the situation of most people.
What got me thinking was someone's blog post which included the assertion that the days of Ralph Kramden, when a young man could graduate from high school and go directly into a job he could expect to keep, with appropriate advancement, for the next 30 or so years, are gone. This begs the question as to where the failure is. What if it is not with the post-secondary educational system, but with the secondary?
A friend this evening posted on her Facebook a little bit of satire I've seen before:
Teachers' hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It's time we put thing in perspective and pay them for what they do - babysit! We can get that for minimum wage. That's right. Let's give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:...00 PM with 45 min off for lunch and plan-- that equals 6 1/2 hours). Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that's $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations. LET'S SEE.... That's $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year. Wait a minute -- there's something wrong here! There sure is! The average teacher's salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student--a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!
Thing is, I think too many people on this continent -- particularly in the nation in the middle -- DO treat school as a babysitting service. Oh, they wouldn't call it that, of course, but the expectation is that that is just where kids go without any real expectation of what they get out of it. It's ingrained in the mass culture. Think of just about any movie or TV show about high school students. The school is most often just a backdrop for the "real" events of the kids lives. If there is any emphasis on the learning it's generally only in terms of earning good enough grades to get into college. That's where real learning/training takes place. My Dad told me once that he had a relative tell him not to waste his time taking a foreign language in high school, since he'd just have to do it in college anyway. It's not a new attitude.
But what if we as a culture changed the way we look at high school? What if high school was where Real World learning occurred? Obviously, some students would still be bound for post-secondary education, but if the option were there, students could be prepared to enter the workforce without incurring huge debt to do so ... and work more than a McJob. It's doable. Certain of my Italian friends are sure to correct my impression of Italian education (I was on the outside looking in), but the one thing that really struck me about it was that students made a choice in middle school as to what general direction their careers would take and choose their secondary education accordingly. At 14 a student can choose either a university-bound path by entering a "Lyceum", or a track that will prepare them to start looking for work as soon as they graduate by entering an "Institute". There are different, specialized Lyceums: Classical (with an emphasis on language, history and philosophy), Scientific (with an emphasis on the maths and sciences) and Humanities (with an emphasis on the social sciences and teaching). There are also different Institutes: Technical and Professional primarily, which teach a variety of specialized tracks like computer science and business administration.
To adopt this kind of high school division would take a major shift in attitude in North America, but the existence of VoTechs and specialized art high schools demonstrate that the general idea is already accepted on some level. I know there would be people who claim 13 and 14 year olds aren't capable of making life decisions, but frankly our current system contributes to the delayed maturity and prolonged adolescence that many acknowledge is a real problem in our society. There are others who would lament the end of the community cohesiveness that a shared high school experience provides, but that is also already cracking with the proliferation of magnet schools within the public system, charter, private, and parochial schools outside of it, and of course, the dramatic rise in home schooling.
Regardless, a change in high school that expects to turn out students with real skills to enter their adult lives would be a step in the right direction that addresses at least this one large Occupy concern ... although it would probably cost a lot in the short term, which would annoy the Tea Party. Still, I don't think the status quo is really working for us anymore.
