The Decaying Evolution of Education...

[LizzieMaine]

I know a PhD who's teaching high school English for $30,000 a year and is thankful to get it. That's less than I make managing a theatre, if such a thing is possible, with my measly high school education (and I have a B. A. in English and a B. A. in film studies working *under* me for considerably less than $30 G.).

When I was a kid, even our district superindentant wasn't a PhD. He was a chicken farmer who did school superintending on the side.

As for student debt, one of my theatre kids had the idea she needed a degree in photography in order to pursue a career as a photographer. A certain College of Art was more than happy to encourage that delusion, and mulcted her for over $20,000 for just the first year, after which she realized she'd never make enough money to pay back the debt so she quit before they could get her on the hook for the other 60 grand. If that's not a dirty stinking racket, it'll do till one gets here. (By the way, that was three years ago. That same Fine College is now charging the poor suckers upwards of $30,000 a year. I don't imagine the quality of the education has gone up $10,000 worth in the interval.)

All that being so, when I hear people quacking on and on about how "these spoiled brats today don't know what it's all about, I worked my way thru college making cole slaw at the KFC and they're just too lazy and entitled to pull themselves up by their bootstraps" I want to shove my shoe down their throats. *They* are the ones who don't know what it's all about.

 

[JimWagner]

I'm sure my take on this will not go over well.

Prior to WWII most, if not all, people who went to college were from the "privileged" class and were there to get the kind of education that made it possible to socialize and move in those circles. Possibly engineers were the exception to that. And those people were tracked into companies owned by their families and connected social circles.

Learning to earn a living was not the goal of that type of education.

After WWII the GI bill made it possible for many who would never have been able to afford college to do so, but the emphasis was on learning things that would make them upwardly mobile in the work place. Engineering, sciences and so forth.

It wasn't really until the 60's that the idea of college for everyone began. And really even then not that high a percentage of 60's high school students actually went on to graduate from college.

More of us boomers went to college than our parents, but it's the kids of boomers who really went to college in great numbers.

The problem is that by then we have kids going to college who are NOT socially connected and part of the "upper" classes with their futures assured in family businesses or industries where they'll be starting near the top. These kids have to go to work and earn their way. They are middle class kids who are going to have to fight to stay middle class. If they studied things directly related to potential careers then they at least stand a chance.

If they bought into the whole liberal arts education thing, then they are not really prepared to go earn a living. The real world will just kick their butts. And the universities didn't prepare them for that reality.

Now, before I get branded as anti university I should say that I'm a boomer born in 1947, went to a 2 year technical college and had a successful career as a computer programmer (as did my wife). We sent both of our kids to college. BUT we made it very clear to them both that they would have to earn their ways through life and they needed to plan their educations accordingly. For sure that wasn't the academic party line.

Our daughter went to college first and got a BS in biochemistry. She knew that we couldn't afford to pay for graduate school for her and pay for our
son's undergraduate degree at the same time so on her own she went out and found a scholarship that paid her way to an MS in forensic science and genetics. She's worked for 10 years now in the combined military crime lab (civilian) and is a year into working on her PhD, paid for by her employer.

Our son got his BS in computer science and decided not to pursue advanced degrees. He also has a successful career.

Neither one had student loans and are not saddled with that burden.

I feel sorry for all the kids who were always destined to have to fight to stay or attain middle class and received an education designed for those born into money whose "careers" were assured before they ever set foot in college.

And I blame the educational system from the bottom all the way to the highest levels that have failed those kids, all the while denying any responsibility to prepare those kids for careers by saying it's not what college is for.

Perhaps colleges should just go back to admitting and turning out the scions of money. They'd do less damage that way.

 

[ChiTownScion]

In all the outrage over student loans in recent years, the thing I find most depressing is the seemingly unanimous agreement that the only purpose for higher education is a high-paying job. Do people who fail to obtain such a job actually regret that they are educated? Do they pine for their former ignorance? I can't say that my years of college ever earned me very much money (being an English major didn't help) but they made me the well-rounded citizen of the world I am today.

And the other aspect of it is this: I had a lot of fun in college!

I don't mean an alcohol fueled spoiled frat boy existence fun, or an unwashed slacker drug crazed fun. I mean, for example, the friendships that have lasted a lifetime. Those Saturdays spent in a library: six hours researching a term paper, and then another six following a thread of intellectual pursuit unrelated to course work. The concerts, plays, guest lecturers, and symposiums. Even the hard work aspect, studying for a course and then emerging with a decent grade... there was a lot of enrichment and fulfillment in that too. It was exhilarating! I couldn't have enjoyed a minute of it if my parents were footing the bill for my education, but perhaps because I spent summers working some of the crappiest factory jobs imaginable, I relished the intellectual achievement aspect of it all.

Can you get all of that outside of a university education? I believe that there are rare individuals of extraordinary focus who do... but they are few and far between. For me, however, I could have never experienced life as it unfolded- and it has been a good one, thus far- without college.

 

[tonyb]

I dunno, Jim. Your perspective is likely sharper than mine, informed as yours is and mine isn't.

Still, I gotta think that education for its own sake ain't such a bad thing, provided one can afford it. What troubles me now, just as it did when I was in school, is colleges and universities offering degrees in disciplines whose names at least suggest there might be a money-making career awaiting those holding the diplomas. Journalism, for instance.

Yes, a person can learn a whole lot in J school, if it's a school with crack faculty. It's a worthwhile effort for the student. Alas, I'd wager than fewer than one in 10 J school grads ever made their living in journalism. Nope, they had to choose a major, and journalism seemed less daunting than chemistry. And even if the J schooling had them coming around to actually considering a career in journalism, there just aren't anywhere near enough jobs. Nowhere near. Never were.

So, the students got a good education, probably, and that's better than not getting a good education. And it might get them jobs requiring a bachelor's degree, any bachelor's degree, no mater how unrelated to the job itself it might be. Lots of that going around these days.

I'd rather know more about chemistry than I do. And biology. And accounting. And art history. And ...

 

[Flick]

Try this test from 1912:

http://endoftheamericandream.com/ar...1912-shows-how-dumbed-down-america-has-become

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^^

Send me back to school.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Tests like the above are often circulated among the internet crowd as some sort of proof that we are dumber now than we were 100 years ago. "Most adults today couldn't pass the old-time 8th grade test", they claim. Well, the fact is, even fewer adults in 1912 could pass this test, and most today couldn't pass a current 8th grade exam either. Tests like these are designed to test the memorization of very specific facts drilled into students during the preceding weeks. The only thing this type of exercise proves is that people don't retain very well specialized information that they don't use regularly. And that's not unique to modern society.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Agreed. Rote memorization was the main method used in the schools of the late 19th/early 20th century. I have a recording of a 1931 broadcast over the municipal radio station WNYC in New York focusing on the city's education system, and a highlight of that broadcast is an actual session of an eighth-grade history class. The teacher discusses the lessons of the previous week and then questions the class, calling on various students in turn to recite the facts learned -- and the kids rattle off those facts in a very precise manner. But that's all they do -- there doesn't seem to be any attempt by the teacher to interpret those facts, they're merely facts for their own sake about so-and-so doing such-and-such on this or that date.

That's not to say those kids might not have had to write a theme on what they learned and in doing so put those facts into some sort of context, but nonetheless, the emphasis here was definitely on facts for facts' sake. That's a good way to bone up for a test, but I wonder how much of that information those kids retained, or even how much they really understood about it.

I'm living proof that unused information doesn't last very long. I have no aptitude at all for mathematics, and my abilities along that line are stunted at about the fourth grade level. I have to write out the whole "carry the one" business when I add, and I have to recite my times tables to myself when I multiply, and I can't do division at all. It's not that I didn't take and pass all the required courses, it's that I've had absolutely no use for what I learned in them, and it's completely gone away. All I retain of math is what I need to function in the daily world.

Oh, and they spelled "endeavor", "secrete," and "assassinated" wrong.

 

[tonyb]

There's something to be said for rote memorization. But digital technology has done more to erode the practical value of a large store of facts and figures in one's brain than did the printing press. Occupations that once required such knowledge have either been made obsolete or no longer have such knowledge as a prerequisite. I was asked by a friend what I thought of a cab driver who didn't know his way from the train station to a large downtown hotel. "But he had GPS?," I asked.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One does wonder what the lasting impact of Wikipedia will be along that line. When crowd-sourced facts are available at the touch of a screen on any topic from the fall of the Roman Empire to the name of Skeletor's favorite pet, what's the point of individual knowledge?

 

[Harp]

I'm sure my take on this will not go over well.

Prior to WWII most, if not all, people who went to college were from the "privileged" class and were there to get the kind of education that made it possible to socialize and move in those circles.

Learning to earn a living was not the goal of that type of education.

After WWII the GI bill made it possible for many who would never have been able to afford college to do so, but the emphasis was on learning things that would make them upwardly mobile in the work place.

The WWII GI Bill opened college for my uncle, my father returned from Korea and resumed work, and I took the Vietnam GI Bill to the University of Illinois
where I read philosophy and a broad liberal arts curriculum that much to my regret, did not include Gaelic; although Illinois offered Serbo-Croatian and Swahili.

 

[Stormy]

In all the outrage over student loans in recent years, the thing I find most depressing is the seemingly unanimous agreement that the only purpose for higher education is a high-paying job. Do people who fail to obtain such a job actually regret that they are educated? Do they pine for their former ignorance? I can't say that my years of college ever earned me very much money (being an English major didn't help) but they made me the well-rounded citizen of the world I am today.

I approve of this message.

 

[nick123]

I'm back in college, a little older, a little wiser this time around.

There's a level of self-entitlement going on on with some students. All take and no give. I think the failing education system might have to take into account the lack of personal responsibility by students. What that is attributed to is tbd. High school? Media? Parents?

I've always said, "even with a bad teacher you still have your textbook." So in essence, a student has the tools they need to at least learn the subject at hand, though it may require more work.

 

[sheeplady]

One does wonder what the lasting impact of Wikipedia will be along that line. When crowd-sourced facts are available at the touch of a screen on any topic from the fall of the Roman Empire to the name of Skeletor's favorite pet, what's the point of individual knowledge?

But while there's a vast amount of knowledge a mile wide, it's an inch deep in most cases. Try to find advanced (by which I mean upper level) statistical help/ info online. For basic stats it's there, multiple times over so the learner can look at multiple sources. But in advanced stats? Good luck.

I've always said, "even with a bad teacher you still have your textbook." So in essence, a student has the tools they need to at least learn the subject at hand, though it may require more work.

That's a poor excuse for the amount of money and time students invest in their education. Students should expect at least a decent instructor, and considering the high cost of tuition and the fact that administration takes a huge portion of that, administrators should at least guarantee decent instructors.

 

[nick123]

^No you're right. I didn't take that into consideration. I'm taking a few units at a junior college so it's not hard on the bank.

 

[Fading Fast]

One does wonder what the lasting impact of Wikipedia will be along that line. When crowd-sourced facts are available at the touch of a screen on any topic from the fall of the Roman Empire to the name of Skeletor's favorite pet, what's the point of individual knowledge?

Wikipedia is great for learning about something or re-learnig something you half forgot, but having knowledge - of the Roman Empire, Aristotle, Plato, WWI, Newton, Algebra, Lincoln and on and on, having studied it at some point, having a sense of a timeline of history, of why X event caused Y, of how basic chemistry works - in your head (again, even if half forgotten), having even an incomplete "outline" of it in the deep recesses of your mine, is an incredible resource to draw upon for problem solving, for seeing how something might turn out, for suggesting a way to draw an analogy to a current issue, for understanding how a random even might be related.

Those are some of the things that help make people successful in life, able to add value, able to solve problems, able to identify new opportunities, etc. I look things up everyday on the web, but 95% of the time, those searches started with something I already had in my head but needed to expand / check / confirm my knowledge of. While the web makes it monumentally easier to look things up, having learned something and retained some portion of it, IMHO, is the real value - it's were the germ of ideas come from, the ability to see how things work, etc., starts. That I believe is the value of individual knowledge that one can only acquire by learning it first, not just looking it up when they need it (how would they know to look it up if they never learned about it in the first place).

I knew a friend's aunt who was a fact machine (she knew a lot about a lot of things), but my God, she was dense. She never had an original thought, couldn't solve a simple problem, had a very unsuccessful career (and was unhappy in her life), but she unquestionably knew a lot more things than I ever will (and was very proud of that). She was Wikipedia without the human capacity for abstract thought, for connecting seemingly random knowledge into patterns that can be leveraged for ideas. Knowledge, imperfectly stored in our fallible human memories is infinitely more valuable to "higher-level" thinking than all the reference books or Wikipedia access in the world.

 

[tonyb]

This all points to the difficulty in defining "intelligence," let alone measuring it.

It is intelligence of a sort to, say, solve a Rubik's Cube in seconds (some people can), or play from memory thousands of tunes on the piano, or tell the day of the week of some random date 147 years ago, or to know what he or she had for lunch on some random date in 1968 (some people can do that, too). That sort of mental acuity is impressive indeed.

But rare is the person with such gifts who does much of anything novel with it. These aren't the people who change the world. Not often, anyway.

 

[AmateisGal]

College, for me, was invaluable in that it gave me lasting friendships, maturity, the ability to learn how to take care of myself in a controlled environment (living in the dorms) and then later, being able to survive on my own. I was slightly sheltered so it was a great thing for me. And yes, I loved being exposed to the intellectual side of things, to meeting so many new people and experiencing different backgrounds and cultures. I didn't grow up in the city, but on a farm in a very low population area. My high school graduating class had only 32 people in it (and that was one of the larger classes!). It was a rural economy, with most everything driven by farming and ranching. So college opened me to a wider world and I needed that. Plus, I have always been a very bookish person who thrives on intellectualism.

Now my daughter, OTOH, has no desire to go to college (at this point anyway - she's only a sophomore). There are six high schools in our city and hers has 1800 kids in it. That is more than the population of my hometown! So she is exposed to a great deal of variety and culture, plus class choices that are far above anything I imagined in my little itty bitty high school. We live in a city that is very multicultural with lots of arts and entertainment, a university, and several other colleges. I say all this to point out that our upbringings are vastly different and that she is not nearly as sheltered and isolated from the world at her age as I was growing up on a farm and attending a very small school.

My two siblings and I all went to college (my dad did tech school, mom didn't go to college at all). Yet now *everyone* asks me "where is your daughter going to college?" It's just this given that she's going to college, that when you graduate from high school, that's what you do. In this day and age, she would actually be going against the grain if she ended up not going to college.

 

[sheeplady]

^No you're right. I didn't take that into consideration. I'm taking a few units at a junior college so it's not hard on the bank.

I didn't mean to sound harsh, but as an instructor at the college level I see a lot of students who end up with horrid instructors. In most cases it's not because these people are just poor quality teachers, but because they honestly don't care. It's incredibly frustrating that teaching at most colleges isn't valued (at best).

I'm not sure how many jobs there are that you can be absolute crap at half of but have to be stellar at the other half to keep it. I've known faculty who were "good" at both but lost their jobs because they were one publication short or missed the cut off for citations by a few. And I know a couple who got tenure because they had two publications in the top journal and they are horrendous teachers- ranked at the bottom for evaluations and sometimes outrightly inappropriate in the classroom, but will never get told they need to improve their teaching.

 

[Harp]

I didn't grow up in the city, but on a farm in a very low population area. My high school graduating class had only 32 people in it (and that was one of the larger classes!). It was a rural economy, with most everything driven by farming and ranching. So college opened me to a wider world and I needed that. Plus, I have always been a very bookish person who thrives on intellectualism.

I was raised in Chicago, and educated by the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers of Ireland, and never expected to attend college-
my father had been killed in a car accident years earlier and my mother suffered a stroke at thirty-a discipline problem with the CBI,
and the draft had to be dealt with first, but the Army dangled a West Point regular army appointment-until my school record showed Uncle Sam
I wasn't cadet material. When asked why I hadn't done better academically or participated in sports, I simply replied I brought $10 home every night
and college was for the rich. My uncle had taken a degree after WWII but he was an exception-none of the other men had. The Army turned me around
and I aced college after the war. Despite the hardships of youth and all, I think I profited more by having been born on the wrong side of the tracks.