The Moose in the Closet: Reforming Education

Last week I proposed some economic programs that could be taken up by the new administration come January. Some of those proposals were geared towards education (the revised student loan program for people in technical majors, for instance) primarily because I believe that an educated populace is key to a strong economy. And, right now, we really don’t have an educated populace.

I’m not going to repeat the figures you’ve all heard before about America’s educational standings compared to the rest of the world. They’re not good and we know it. Instead, I want to start with a personal anecdote. Three years ago I was at an infectious diseases technical conference. The first speaker was well-known in the field and he gave a talk on the future of infectious diseases research. He presented us with a real problem – the current crop of students coming through our educational system is not prepared to keep the research going. According to the presenter, students are too lazy, they’re not learning the proper fundamentals in high school and undergrad, and they all have their eyes on big-money jobs without doing the time. His proposal: find ways to bring more foreigners to American institutions.

This goes beyond outsourcing, in my opinion. What we’re talking about here is sponsoring foreign students so that they can continue on the research that keeps infectious pandemics from wiping out entire populations and hoping that some of these students decide to stay here. This is conceding technical and educational dominance to the rest of the world and I’ve heard that very proposal several times since. This is a problem, and it needs to be fixed.

Where do the roots of the problem lie? Some folks say it’s from the growing insistence that education is a dirty word. That it’s better to be a Joe Six-Pack than someone with a college degree and a career. Whereas I think that could be part of the problem, I don’t think it’s the main issue. Some folks say the problem stems from primary and secondary school programs like No Child Left Behind, which could take needed resources from some schools and force states to lower their educational standards. Again, whereas I agree that NCLB is a problem, it’s not THE problem, and it certainly doesn’t explain the folks in their late-teens and low-20s that just aren’t cutting it.

Here’s another anecdote. In elementary school I was in a program from 4-6th grade called G&T – it stood for “Gifted & Talented.” This was a public school program where certain students were selected to take advanced English, social studies, math, and science courses. The rest of the students’ schedules were filled with what were essentially electives. There were language options, music options (orchestra, marching band, or opera/music appreciation), art options – it was a program designed to fit the needs of the students who were above the baseline. A lot of the students in that program went on to top universities and started successful careers in many different industries.

Several years later the program was canceled. It wasn’t for lack of funding or results – it was because enough people complained that a program called “Gifted & Talented” implied that the children who weren’t in it were neither gifted nor talented. Now, I agree to an extent, maybe the naming convention was a bit crass (and, as I’ll point out later, the program probably a bit too broad in its execution). But the program wasn’t renamed, it was canceled, because it was decided that all elementary school students deserved the same level of education.

And that, in my opinion, is the problem with our education system. It’s this American Dream thing, the same driving force behind the housing crisis. This belief that just because we’re all born equal, we stay equal. That everyone should have a house and every child should receive every benefit of the education system.

That belief is bullshit.

Now, I’m not saying that the public education system shouldn’t extend every possible opportunity to every possible student. But it should remain an opportunity. If a child doesn’t meet the requirements to take advantage of that opportunity he or she shouldn’t be allowed to take it. Hell, if a child doesn’t WANT to take advantage of a particular opportunity he or she shouldn’t have to take it. I have friends that are high school teachers, some of them teach AP classes, and I hear plenty of stories of parents that are forcing their kids into these AP programs. These kids are failing the class and slowing the other students down. They can’t be taken out of the class; all the teacher can do is recommend that the class may not be a good idea for the child. And, more often than not, the parent ignores the advice.

I believe that ingenuity comes from the people with real-world experiences. From the kids that weren’t afforded all of the luxuries of a financially stable home and private school. From the kids who had to take the little they had and turn it into a lot. But when these kids enter the public education system and are given the same level of education as the kids who don’t have the drive to turn their situation around or don’t have the same interests as them, they will never be equipped with the tools required to make a difference in this world.

And I still haven’t touched on the driving force behind THIS problem: colleges.

There’s a college for everyone these days, with the promise of a “better life” after completing four-years of undergrad that comes along with it. Colleges are big businesses now, and they lower their acceptance standards, lower their grading standards, and introduce programs for low-performers that completely devalue the degree and once again force the students that would normally excel to be slowed down by the students that are trying to keep up.

It’s time for a comic book analogy. Back in the 1990s there was a collectors’ market that sprung out of one basic idea: “Hey, 40 years ago Amazing Fantasy #15 sold for 15-cents. Now it’s worth $50,000. We should invest in comic books!” Everyone starting buying up first appearances, first issues, and gimmick covers thinking they’d get a 100,000% return on their investment 40 years later. The comic market fed this ideology by churning out new “hot books” every week, inflating the print run, and making a ton of money in the process. After several years of this, people started realizing that the reason why Amazing Fantasy #15 was worth so much wasn’t just because it was the first appearance of a timeless character but also because there weren’t many copies on the market. All of a sudden, owning one of the millions of copies of X-Force #1 didn’t seem like a good investment, and those comics were no longer worth the paper they were printed on.

Well, guess what? Being one of the millions of people in American with a four-year degree in English doesn’t necessarily make you a better candidate for a job. But colleges don’t measure their success on what happens to their alumni after they leave the school. They measure success on how many students are enrolled and getting good GPAs. And, as a result, your degree in this global economy is being devalued.

So there’s a college out there that will accept you, it’s the American Dream to send your child to college, and parents want their kids to take advantage of every opportunity public schools have in order to prepare their kids for college. It’s a noble cause, I’m sure, but it only hurts the system.

Look…the world needs secretaries. It needs mechanics. It needs retailers and customer service representatives. The world needs people to fill a lot of jobs that don’t require a college education. Maybe these jobs require an associates’ degree or a certificate or trade school or a rigorous training program but not a four-year degree that doesn’t offer you any leverage in the career path you’ll find yourself in.

There’s nothing wrong with not going to college. Many members of my family did perfectly well for themselves by simply working hard. By making a choice and sticking to it and seeing it through to the end.

This might seem counter intuitive to my initial point, that America needs a more educated populace. But a more educated populace doesn’t necessarily mean more people with college degrees. It means people who are GOOD at what they do and they’re happy with their career path. You know, I can probably do math better than 99% of all mechanics in America but all mechanics in America can diagnose and fix a car’s problems better than I can. So with that said, who’s smarter? We’re both experts in our field, so the question is kind of pointless.

I guess my point is that education reform needs to start by addressing the fact that not everyone needs to be educated the same exact way. Some kids could pick up on science and math at an early age and run with it. Some kids could lean more towards the liberal arts. Some kids may simply love cars and want to work on them for the rest of their lives. And most kids will have absolutely no idea what they want to do until they graduate high school and start working – they can then decide to continue taking classes after they have a focus.

There’s a way to educate and prepare all of these individuals starting in elementary school. If I had to propose a program, I’d say we scrap No Child Left Behind and put an unprecedented LACK of structure and requirements on public schools. Adopt a college system where there are basic requirements a person has to fulfill but then they can focus their learning in one direction or another. There are advanced math classes for the kid that likes math and those classes can replace some history or English classes down the line. What about classes in 4-6th grade that teaches the basics of mechanical systems? What about physics or electronics? Nurture their skills and interests at a young age instead of forcing them to learn things they have no interest in, will never use again, and will never truly grasp.

In doing that we lessen the need for colleges. We’re not just overwhelming kids with information on all available subjects so that they need college in order to figure out what they want to do. We’re letting them know, from the start, they can be anything they want to be instead of telling them they can be what they want to be while forcing them to take geometry or calculus or biology or world history.

In our expanding, complicated world making sure all children master reading, writing, and arithmetic may not be the way to go anymore. A publication education system that’s designed to produce well-rounded students in order to prepare them for college may not be the way to go anymore. We need to accept the fact that some kids are going to be rocket scientists, some kids are going to write up their technical papers, and some kids are going to file those papers. And they shouldn’t have the same education for the first 18+ years of their lives.

We need to prepare kids to have a positive impact in our economy, not to be statistics and dollars in our universities.

Labels: editorial, education, politics

Reforming Education

Monday, October 06, 2008

0 Comments

Previous Posts