Public Education
POSTED BY: TheHappyTrader
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 10, 2024 23:18
VIEWED: 7483
PAGE 3 of 7
Quote:
Originally posted by Geezer:
But say everyone wanted to study English Literature. Not a lot of refrigerators or solar panels get build by happy English Lit majors. Not a lot of food gets grown.
This would only be true if happy English Lit majors have no ability to learn to build refrigerators and solar panels. Once they learned their ONE field, they've filled their quota and can no longer learn anything else.
If they can learn English Lit, they can learn how to build refrigerators and solar panels as well. Why limit them to only ONE thing they can learn?
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Arrogant and proud of it.
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Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:
This would only be true if happy English Lit majors have no ability to learn to build refrigerators and solar panels. Once they learned their ONE field, they've filled their quota and can no longer learn anything else.
If they can learn English Lit, they can learn how to build refrigerators and solar panels as well. Why limit them to only ONE thing they can learn?
I have no intention of limiting anyone.
I think we're all pretty much saying that it's good to follow what stirs your soul, floats you boat, whatever.
I just think that when you do so, you should also be aware that your passion may not provide you a living wage, and that you should prepare to have some sort of skill you can employ to earn enough to allow you to do what you love. If you can't afford food and shelter, it's difficult to enjoy stuff.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Hello,
Yes, Geezer.
Once you can read, write, add, subtract, multiply, divide, and understand fractions...
You are ready to join 90% of the work force.
And then you should learn what interests you, and take it as far as you can.
--Anthony
Assured by friends that the signal-to-noise ratio has improved on this forum, I have disabled web filtering.
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Quote:Someone whose skill is to assemble solar panels in a place where there are no solar panel jobs might need to learn to write because there is an opening for a reporter at the local paper. I think it goes without saying that you may not always get a living wage in the field in which you are skilled. It is good to learn more than one skill set--in fact, the more the better.
Originally posted by Geezer:
I just think that when you do so, you should also be aware that your passion may not provide you a living wage, and that you should prepare to have some sort of skill you can employ to earn enough to allow you to do what you love.
I think your concern applies only when an individual has limited ability or opportunity for learning skills. If they had to choose only one or two, it would not make sense for them to waste one of two precious slots with basket-weaving or coin-collecting. Rather, they would be better off learning a skill set that is marketable in their community FIRST, and then adding other skill slots LATER, if they can.
I see four steps in education towards job performance:
1. Primary and secondary education.
BASIC skills, skills that are required in ALL jobs: reading, writing, arithmetic, typing on the computer, basic history, basic science, critical thinking, etc.
2. College education or vocational training.
BASIC vocational skills in the field that you hope to work in: how to learn new specialized information, how to find out new specialized information, how to speak the language/lingo of your field.
3. Graduate education.
Mostly, this part is to learn to speak complicated, specialized lingo fluently and understand the fundamental assumptions and values in your field so well it becomes second nature.
PhD: How to do new original research in a specialized field.
MD, JD, MBA, etc: Or direct vocational training in a complicated, specialized field.
4. On the job training.
Once you get to your job from steps 1, 2, or 3, you still need specialized training to do your particular job. Most of the time, everything you need to know to do the job is learned on the job. So for practical purposes in many jobs, you could have skipped straight from #1 to #4. You can also learn something completely irrelevant in #2 and #3, and still learn everything there is to learn in #4.
That is why you can have a professor in Economics who got his PhD in physics. Or an English Lit major working in a bank. Or a Phys Ed major doing landscaping and interior design. Or a high school graduate can become a stock broker.
If you can learn how to do your job AT your job, why not use education to learn what you love? The difficulty is not in your skill sets, but in getting hired. But if you can convince your future boss that you are a hard worker and learn on-the-job quickly, the boss should not care what you got your education in. In fact, that is how all those people mentioned above got jobs. They might start a little lower on the totem pole until they can prove they are a quick learner, but the credentials become secondary once there are results.
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Arrogant and proud of it.
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Another flaw in the education system: It should be a complete preparation for self learning, not a preparation for college. The average total cost of the college experience is now around 250,000, and the average graduate escapes with 100,000 in debt, figuring in all graduate and special degrees. This will take them 10 years if they work towards nothing else, and more often 20. This is the initial source of indentured servitude in this country. Actual indenture servitude is a mortgage, because that's what the original contracts promised in return, which IIRC, is the source of 40 acres and a mule, not a bad deal for 7 years labor by todays standards. Reality is, you work for life, and you get nothing.
This system is steering people towards a situation of crushing debt, which is geared to keep them as a perpetual labor force.
Specifically, a lot of music students will not want to do that. I've known many musicians who end up having to work non-musical jobs to deal with their debt, because music is like writing: You either hit it big or there's no money in it at all. Even if this is why you're teaching, bear in mind that if the students *don't* end up with a lot of debt, they will have much more time to devote towards their music.
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Quote:Nicely said.
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Another flaw in the education system: It should be a complete preparation for self learning, not a preparation for college.
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Arrogant and proud of it.
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John Taylor Gatto has some of the harshest criticisms of public education. Whether he is entirely right or not, I think he makes some good points.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm
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Arrogant and proud of it.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Geezer:Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:
This would only be true if happy English Lit majors have no ability to learn to build refrigerators and solar panels. Once they learned their ONE field, they've filled their quota and can no longer learn anything else.
If they can learn English Lit, they can learn how to build refrigerators and solar panels as well. Why limit them to only ONE thing they can learn?
I have no intention of limiting anyone.
I think we're all pretty much saying that it's good to follow what stirs your soul, floats you boat, whatever.
I just think that when you do so, you should also be aware that your passion may not provide you a living wage, and that you should prepare to have some sort of skill you can employ to earn enough to allow you to do what you love. If you can't afford food and shelter, it's difficult to enjoy stuff.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
I'm pretty much with Geezer on this one. Yes, you should be able to follow your muse, but you should also at least be exposed to some other higher learning as well. As a middle-schooler, I *hated* math, and would take only as little as I absolutely had to to advance to the next grade. Later, I developed a minor fascination with it, since it basically DOES run, well... EVERYTHING.
In high school, I hated government class, and paid scant attention to history. Oddly, I ended up going to college and changing my major (from math, no less!) to a dual major with Government and History, and a side of Constitutional Law.
Point being, you kinda have to expose schoolkids to ALL fields, even the ones they don't like, because they might find a different path later in life. And if they don't, they'll at least be able to add and subtract, hopefully. :)
This Space For Rent!
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I'm with dreamtrove on preparation for self-learning. This is directly antithetical to standardized testing. Self-learning seems to be the most significant tool that we can offer children, along with instilling a passion in doing so, which is more likely if we put some energy into possibility...opening some doors to kids who see no doors. If kids really believe they can get somewhere, they are more likely to try to get there, but for a lot of children, there are a lot of things that are so far removed from their experience that they don't seem real(of course these days they aren't so real...but that might at least partially go hand in hand with education)
point taken about school and debt...and that sort of education that is superficial and possibly non-sustaining.
I am also pretty frustrated that we think it's okay to lie to our children from the very get-go. I don't think we need to start early with gory details(though I'm not entirely sure how much coddling kids need), but if we need positives, we can talk about national ideals and how we have made strides to get there without pretending we have always had some inherent divinity that made us better people.
Those ideals bring me to my next point though. I think we need more emphasis on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. All Americans should know this backwards and forwards, frankly better than I do presently.
More time, more in-depth discussion and debate should be spent on its interpretations throughout high-school, and middle-school should give it more attention. In a democracy that is dependent upon its voters to understand the basic principles of this nation, most voters are way too scetchy on it. It's one of those subjects, along with english, history, and math that I don't think should be elective...though english and history could certainly offer different focuses for different interests.
..............
I think good teachers have more impact on kids than bad teachers do(though I might be wrong about this). In this way, if money were spent right, I really do believe that throwing more money at education is exactly what we should do, making classes smaller by hiring more teachers per district. Looking at Kwicko's story about that one teacher that made an impact on him, I just think that rather than cutting teaching staff and keeping on only the safest, most unoffensive vanilla teachers, the influences on our children should be more diverse. There should be more opportunity to get an interesting, more impactful teacher in the mix, even if it's just for one year, or one class.
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The self learners I have known understand far more about govt. than the educated. I think this is because any course in govt. from a govt. run school is going to give you a rosy propagandistic psychologically manipulative view of govt and history. You'll do much better just trying to sus it out for yourself.
If you set up a situation where students need to have a certain level of knowledge in order to complete a task, they will get it by themselves.
As a kid, I played D&D, even before leaving school. By the time I left school, I'd left D&D for better role playing games. I was already doing pretty intensive research into how medieval economies and govts. ran so that I could make more realistic play scenarios for the game. The game ended up being a better driver for selecting self-educating behavior than school assignments.
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