“College: A Cruel Hoax For Some”
This is an excellent post by my buddy, Rod, and the accompanying comments are also well worth reading.
May 10, 2008
Nobody Has Trackbacked Yet
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May 10th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
The post (and, it sounds like, the Atlantic essay) absolutely nails it. The “everyone should go to college” mentality is destructive on so many levels. I recently read in my hometown paper that the school system I graduated from in 2001 was abolishing different diploma tracks (formerly there was a college prep and a “tech prep” vocational track) because (paraphrasing) “we have the same high expectations of all our students.” Part of the problem is defining success by % of students who go to college, without looking at graduation rates 4 years later, or, for that matter, how much good a BA in “Communications” with a 2.5 GPA from Random Regional State U. does for those who obtain it.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:21 am
The joke is our primary schools are not accomplishing basic skills of reading, writing and athrimatic. There are a lot more functionally illiterate people out there than you realize.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:14 am
“The joke is our primary schools are not accomplishing basic skills of reading, writing and athrimatic. There are a lot more functionally illiterate people out there than you realize.”
This is the thing that’s come as such a shock to me. I heard about failing schools all my life, but I was very fortunate not to have attended one. When I actually arrived at university, I was just stunned at the lack of basic ability I saw around me. I didn’t receive a big, expensive education, either–the diocese basically floated us by on an installment plan and I got what a poor Church infrastructure in South Carolina could provide in the process. It was a shoestring operation, really.
But the kids who had attended massive, lavishly-funded public schools, with football stadiums, trips to Europe for the French club, and on and on, couldn’t grasp the basics of subject-verb agreement. Kids from such fine-sounding places as Spring Valley had attended schools with more money for extacurricular activities than we had had for our entire budget, but they couldn’t add or comprehend what they read, much less place World War One in its proper decade. I’ve been convinced that education in basic skills and knowledge is a very, very inexpensive enterprise, and that our supposed interest in “educating the whole child” is nothing but a scam to expand the size and power of the education establishment itself.