by Rishubhav
We've touched upon the subject of education in a few discussions before, but as sectori rightfully pointed out "that's a hole different can of worms", so I thought I'd make a post devoted to this discussion. Of course "education" itself is a vast and nebulous topic, but its good to start big. Please, post your own views, compliment my own (pfft), rebut them (much more likely), or completely ignore them (please, at least give them a good flaming). Continued: Click "Read More"
My views on the topic:
- As others have pointed out, we need drastically more federal funding for schools, especially the sciences. However, this money shouldn't just be thrown at current structures with the hope that it will magically fix our educational woes. We should focus on the creation of more charter and magnet schools, and the expansion of federal college scholarships so that the hardworking and bright can achieve success regardless of their financial situation.
- For the majority of students who pass through the school system without getting a college degree, the job of schooling should be to instill the core values of any vibrant democracy: skepticism, and intellectualism. Schools should teach their students not to take anything at face value, be it presidents calling for war, or politicians warning of global warming (not suggesting that it doe not exist, merely that we need to teach students to not blindly trust politicians but to look at the hard facts and peer-reviewed science behind everything)
- Finally, we must bear in mind that education, while a powerful tool is a tool, not a panacea. Disciple of Science said in a comment in the McCain Birthday Post that : "Because if people become more educated, society would not revolve around the materialism, ignorance, and addiction to trivial indulgences that has our youth failing school, rendered comedic media the epitome of vulgarity, given creationism a place in our public schools, and elected George "Dubyah" Bush to be the President of the United States of America." Hyperbole aside, this statement shares the conviction that many Democrats have - that theirs is the party of the educated, and that educations will magically turn everyone into a liberal Democrat. Remember that many of the richest, smartest (and in most cases the two are linked) people in the world are Republicans. It is precisely this type of bias that we must endeavor to keep out of education or we will do nothing more than alienate half the nation.
6 comments:
I agree that the current state of our public school systems is abysmal, but that is certainly not a reason to abandon public schooling in favor of charter and magnet schools. Furthermore, the Bush Administration has done wonders for these charter schools via the No Child Left Behind Act, which, as it stands, is quite evidently a loophole to funnel children out of failing public schools and into these charter schools, which have not aided anything. Moreover, the most accessible of these schools are religious, (note: I have nothing against religion,) and therefore teach creationism, which will hurt our democracy, societal progression, and scientific advancement. (When I get the time, I will compose a whole post about the Intelligent Design epidemic.)
I also agree that skepticism should be taught in schools, but what must be taught alongside it is that all scientific skepticism must be based on evidence, not ideology. For instance, there was an "academic freedom" act passed in Louisiana recently that is based on the principle of skepticism, but not that of evidence. That bill even explicitly labeled unchallenged,widely accepted, and observable phenomena such as evolution via natural selection as controversial, whereas actually controversial theories such as epigenetics aiding disease and quantum mechanics went unspecified, (I only listed quantum mechanics because Einstein opposed it and supposedly was on the verge of a "theory of everything" shortly before his death, and quantum mechanics is now being used to search for such a theory.)
You say that education is a tool, not a panacea, which might or might not be true. But, if it is just a tool, then what do you propose must be used alongside education to progress societally other than basic compassion and ethics?
Also, polls show that those who are college educated overwhelmingly support Barack Obama, unless they have corporate ties.
I'm not suggesting abandoning public schooling, I'm suggesting expanding charter and magnet schooling so as to provide a viable alternative to traditional geography-based public schooling.
Giving parents more choices in their childrens education can only be a good thing, as can forcing schools to compete for students.
Incidentally, the reason that the Democrats oppose charter schooling is because the teachers unions have come out against them. Of course that's like listening to the owner of a McDonalds about whether or not to allow Burger King to move in.
I don't see that the point about religion has any purpose - if religious people provide a better service than the secular, who are we to deny citizens the right to that service? Using your argument because the blogosphere is mostly liberal the government should stop supporting the Internet.
I fully agree with you that evidence based skepticism should be taught in schools. However, while we teach evolution, we should teach children to question it, to trust nothing but that hard facts and evidence.
When I said that education was a tool not a panacea, I meant that while education can solve many societal ills, there are equally many it cannot solve, namely "materialism", and "addiction to trivial indulgences". In fact, I would argue that materialism and trivial indulgences are not problems at all.
Materialism is what drives societal advance, "trivial indulgences" what make life in that society worth living. These are basic attributes that no amount of education can "fix", and for good reason. Take a look at the mansions of highly educated Silicon Valley millionaires, and you'll see they're as materialistic as they come.
As for your last point, I suppose you're right, if only because you've ruled out every college educated person except the few who have managed to go through life without ever working for a corporation. Remember, the vast majority of the nation, college educated or not has "corporate ties"
Rishubhav: You are correct in your assertion that many educated Democrats snobbishly view their party as the sole location of intelligent people. Although I don't endorse this view, Disciple of Science has a point when he reminds you that Obama has a significant edge among the well-educated.
Education can't solve all our problems; I understand this. But it can dictate the future of a country. Remember that the first thing Mao did when he wanted to suppress China was to imprison or kill the intellectuals. An informed population is in the best position to make wise decisions about its future.
Consider the millions of Americans in credit card debt. If our schools had mandatory (and decently taught) basic economics courses throughout junior high and high school, then all Americans would be safeguarded on some level against foolish economic decisions that mortgage their futures and the futures of their children.
We have to be careful with charter schools and vouchers. For several years I attended a high-need public school in New York's inner city where over 75% of the students lived in poverty.
One thing I of many that I learned from this is that the housing projects which surrounded the school had been gerrymandered such that the kids of the neighborhood didn't have to go to school with the kids who lived in the projects. It was de facto segregation. Predictably, there was a huge disparity in budget between the poor and rich neighborhood schools.
No Child Left Behind hurts schools like the one I went to: schools where there are 30 kids to a classroom, underpaid teachers and no art or science room.
Schools like this can't compete in standardized testing with schools in other neighborhoods that can afford fancy science facilities and better teacher-student ratios. Predictably, schools like mine, the ones that need the money most get their funding cut by NCLB.
Vouchers and charter schools reinforce the problem. Giving the best students a fast track out of these schools is a terrible idea. These students (often the more privileged ones) will leave (of course) at the first chance they get, giving the schools an added disadvantage (which inevitably results in more funding cuts).
This doesn't solve the problem; it merely exacerbates it. The solution is to raise teacher pay, invest in the highest-need areas, and create incentives by way of grants to teaching degrees and funding increases to attract people turned off by teaching's unacceptably low salaries.
More than anyone, teachers hold the futures of our youth in their hands. We should do anything and everything necessary to make sure that they have the pay, benefits, education, resources, and facilities so that they are adequately prepared to teach our younger generation.
I'll let Disciple blaze the trail on the Intelligent Design issue. He'll be able to articulate his opinions in a more articulate manner than I.
John Edwards, flawed as he may personally be, had the right idea about education. He understood that even more of this ridiculous standardized testing won't solve our problems, especially when everyone who looks at the numbers sees that it grossly favors certain demographic groups over others.
I know that standardized testing is not going away in the near future (there is no reasonable solution to replace it). I do think, though, that punishing the worse-performing schools is a fundamentally misguided idea: they are the ones that usually need the money most.
Our education system, as anything, should be judged not by its finest moments but by its worst. When we see our student's scores falling each year and decide to counter that by making the tests easier, we aren't solving a problem. It's a feel-good pretend solution, and things like that can't be tolerated when the future of our children is at stake .
When I took the SAT, my testing site was in a heavily black and hispanic neighborhood. Waiting in line with nervous (mostly black) juniors, I thought about the state of their education system.
Having read about the school, I thought about how they had had no other choice but to attend this place, an institution that could never compete with better-funded places elsewhere in the city, state, and nation. I thought about these kids' futures. They were, by and large, not prepared for college. I estimate that very few went on to higher education.
They were good kids: they studied hard and did their work. But the school system was stacked against them. The NYC Board of Education is universally despised. It's name in association with a solution for any actual problem will elicit a huge eye-roll from administrator and teacher alike.
These students, by no fault of their own, had had the deck stacked against him by a flawed education system. I was filled with righteous anger over this issue which persists to this day.
This, apart from being just plain morally wrong, will be a huge liability for our nation in the years to come. Gang violence in the ghetto and inner city is a direct result of a failed system which doesn't give many kids an opportunity to lift themselves up. That's not the American Dream (whatever that is), that's not my dream, and I hope it's not anyone's dream.
So the issue is how to fix the education system.
I await your comments.
PS: Risubhav, you know what Disciple means. "Corporate ties" means leadership of a corporation.
I also have to add that, while there is a significant amount of energy put into discussions of science education, I think that there are other areas of education that need some serious attention, including, but not limited to, the teaching of foreign languages.
The other thing that I have noticed is an increasing lack of even the most basic awareness of current events and international relations in students at, for example, my school. While it's all well and good to teach students about the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, what good will that knowledge do them in life if they have never heard of the European Union and can't find Iraq on a map?
I suppose if they are planning to go into Classics, but that's a different story, and something that few people do these days.
As to the issue of public schools, it turns out that YoungSentinel already said what I was going to say (thank goodness for Preview), namely that funding should be going to the schools that have demonstrated an inability to keep up with the education needs of their students, not just by way of financial support, but also in the area of teacher training, benefits, and upkeep (i.e. making sure teachers come back).
I'm going to make another controversial statement related to the above: I think it says a sad thing about our country when a professional athlete is payed millions of dollars, while a teacher who may have devoted most of his or her life to educating the future of this country is payed only a small fraction of that amount.
Absolutely right, Sectori.
I don't care about how much athletes get payed. Their jobs are rough. It's their business. I am bothered when people complain about how much they get payed. Who cares? This issue is how to make sure that teachers, some of our nation's most under-appreciated heroes, get paid a living wage.
Another thing: teacher's unions (and unions in general) are a good thing for the country. We need to return to a national psyche when unions are appreciated for the good work that they do.
At Wal-Mart, one corporation that fires union workers, store managers are, as a matter of corporate policy, instructed to shave down the hours of the workers on the store computers.
The company also refuses to give the workers health care, instead passing the bill to the government by helping them sign up for Medicare.
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart posts billions of dollars in profits quarter after quarter.
We need to invest in education partly so future generations can compete in high-paying, technology jobs. In the meantime, we must protect our workers from a world of big-business that values their own profits over the well-being of its employees.
Gallup shows that while Obama does have a significant edge among those with postgraduate degrees, among college graduates he is within 2 percentage points.
I agree with you that education can dictate the future of the country, and that an informed population is an empowered population, with the caveat that the education must be ideologically neutral.
As for charter schools, I agree that the current methodology of punishing schools for doing poorly is wrongheaded. However, I believe that forcing students to stay in these schools and effectively sacrifice their future for the good of the school is unjust. What if someone had told you that instead of going to the school you currently attend you had to stay in your high-need public school so that your school could get some needed funding?
I believe that especially in metropolitan areas, geography-based schooling should become a thing of the past. Such schooling only reinforces socioeconomic and racial gaps, since those of the same class and race tend to live together.
The future is in charter and magnet schools that a. give students the ability to choose schools that transcend class and race and b. force schools to compete for students as they lose their monopoly on education. It is through a system like this that "good kids" like those you describe can be lifted out of poverty.
We need to stop treating teaching as a labor of love, and start treating teachers like doctors - professionals that perform vital work and should be compensated as such.
The point of unions is a much bigger one, and I'm going to start a topic on that (I predict these discussion topics will grow exponentially), but as it pertains to teachers its different from most union situations since the union is not working for a corporation, but a government.
Just as an example, put yourself in the shoes of a teacher who has tenure in a school that does not offer performance based pay. What incentive do you have to go the extra mile and inspire your students when you could just keep plugging away doing the bare minimum and still get the same pay? Given there are many teacher who do push themselves and their students, but they are exceptions to the rule.
Incidentally, when all the "future generations can compete in high-paying, technology jobs", who takes the low-paying service jobs? Who serves these highly educated tech workers at restaurants, who helps them at Wal-Mart, who cleans the schools?
Post a Comment