You don't think education in the USA is not screwed up? Humor me on this one and go ahead and read this blog. I have an idea how we got education so screwed up and if I am right, it may point to how we can get it corrected. You can't solve a problem is you don't know what caused the problem. You could take an aspirin for the pain in you finger, but if you had not hit your finger with the hammer in the first place, you would not need to aspirin. Regarding our education system, it seems that the only think we know to do is to throw more money at the problem. The fact that this has not worked should convince some of you that lack of money may not be the cause of our poor performance!!
Here is my take. Our education model started back several hundred years ago in jolly old England. Who were the people who went to college back then? They were the rich and landed. What did they need education for? So they could talk smart at parties and speak in different languages so that the lower classes could not participate. They studied literature which were mostly made up stories or a slanted view of history. Don't you think it strange that few mathematicians or scientists' writings were considered "literature"? I guess that it had to have some kind of "make believe" element to it. The affect of all this was to create a model of education that had little to do with helping one succeed in life. Most of the real mathematicians and scientists of the time were self taught or learned by correspondence between each other in the form of "letters". Many of these can be found today, but are not included in any study of literature. Math and science have their own languages, so why are they not considered worthy of being taught in language classes? It is because of how and where our education model started.
I think that we would all agree that our need for education has changed from the time when the study of made up stories was the theme of the day. For the past 100 years we have been on technology driven ride that does not appear to be slowing, so why has our education system not recognized that simple fact? I just spoke with the mother of a 17 year old son who is getting "A's" in German and wants to study German in college. The mother was so proud of her son. I would have been more proud of him if he was as interested in playing pool. Studying German and playing pool have about equal values, but look how much money she would save if he studied pool instead.
In a prior blog, I pointed out the number of degrees earned in our colleges and that 10 times as many of our kids get degrees in Political Science and Communications than in the Sciences. While the number of school teacher degrees increased by 50%, the number of Science and Engineering degrees stayed the same. This was while our total spending on college and the number of kids in college increased. If that does not give you reason for concern, I do not know what will. It is even worse when you look at advanced Science and Engineering degrees where over 50% of the degrees are earned by kids who were not born in the USA. How can that be? Not only are our kids dumb and lazy, so are most of their parents. They have turned the minds of their kids over to the government run schools and see what they have gotten. It is like the Post Office and labor unions are running our schools. Oh, that is exactly what is happening.
My first point was that we picked up this education model from jolly old England from 500 years ago and it need to be changed. We need to look a education as an investment that it is. Further, we need to look at both the public tax money and personal money that we spend on our schools and make sure that we get our monies worth. What do I mean by monies worth? I mean that it should make the economic pie bigger, bigger GNP and it should improve the general quality of life. The quality of life is the difficult on to quantify, but I think we can do it. We have no control over the money that individuals chose to spend on education, but we do on the public tax money. We need to rank all the classes from grammar school thru college in terms of how they will affect the future GNP and the general quality of life. This will be difficult, but any logical system is better than what we now have. What I think is going to happen, if we are all honest in this process, is that many of the classes that we now spend a lot of tax money and human resources are going to end up far down the "worth it" list. If we can change the "liberal arts" mentality that we got from jolly old England and refocus on what we need for the future, we will have done a great service to our children and grand children.
Liberal arts is not going to go away, but it will be in the class of hobbies like pool and volley ball where it belongs. The result is that we will be spending more of our resources on Science and Engineering where it will prepare our children so they can compete in the world of the future.
PS---I lived around musical people all my life and not one ever learned to play in any school or college. They not only played music, they wrote music. Some even made their own musical instruments. Do we have some shortage of musicals to the point that we need to spend tax money for the Post Office and Labor Union to produce more!
PS---Why don't he TV news people ever ask the student rioters what they majors in college were? I know that most will have some Mickey Mouse major that the tax payers paid for.
