Creating an effective education system in the US will require reforms from three main players: Government, Businesses, and Universities.
1. Government:
1a. Hire as teachers only people with degrees in classic academic disiplines, such as: Literature, Linguistics, History, Math, Biology, Anthropology, Psychology, etc.
1b. Create processes and training programs for newly hired teachers, eliminating the expectation that their university educations educated them in how to teach.
1c. Eliminate interscholastic sports competitions. Leave athletic competition for private and public sports leagues.
1d. Make all schools K-12, and all schools small; eliminate mega-schools, the only justification for them seeming to be the creation of winning sports teams and ability to water-down curriculum with many non-academic "electives" in order to accomidate "teachers" who cannot handle serious academic courses.
1e. Make all K-12 curricula standard "old school" core academic courses; no more "electives."
1f. Create Trade Schools and Goofoff centers for students who refuse to participate in regular schools. At Trade Schools, students who refuse to participate in mandatory old-school curricula can learn how to weld and bake cakes, along with some rudimentary math, reading, and writing classes. Student who refuse to at least participate at a Trade school will go to a Goofoff center to play basketball all day. Students at Goofoff centers or Trade schools can always work their way back to regular schools.
1g. Eliminate mandatory attendance. Students who refuse to participate in regular schools will to to Trade school or Goofoff center.
2. Universities:
2a. Eliminate non-academic majors, such as Education, Social Work, Communications, Journalism, Nursing, Physical Therapy, Criminal Justice, Ethnic Studies, and Business.
2b. Eliminate all non-basic, profitable research. Stop competing with private businesses for research. Confine research to topics that will not provide commercial profit. Focus on teaching, not winning research contracts and satisfying corporate sponsors looking to contract out their own work.
3. Businesses: For jobs previously requiring degrees in non-academic subjets such as business, require instead people with degrees in academic fields. Shift training for such jobs as Nursing and Physical Therapy to trade schools.
10 comments:
"1a. Hire as teachers only people with degrees in classic academic disiplines, such as: Literature, Linguistics, History, Math, Biology, Anthropology, Psychology, etc."
This is all fine and good, but first and foremost how about hiring people who can teach.
"2b. Eliminate all non-basic, profitable research. Stop competing with private businesses for research. Confine research to topics that will not provide commercial profit. Focus on teaching, not winning research contracts and satisfying corporate sponsors looking to contract out their own work."
Isn't this an anti-free market position? Shouldn't universities aid the business community by providing low-cost R&D (including low-wage research assistants) in return for money that is used to fund academic programs?
"1a. Hire as teachers only people with degrees in classic academic disiplines, such as: Literature, Linguistics, History, Math, Biology, Anthropology, Psychology, etc."
I agree with Pete. Hire teachers who can teach. You help that with proposal 1b.
"1c. Eliminate interscholastic sports competitions. Leave athletic competition for private and public sports leagues."
I don't disagree with this.
"1d. Make all schools K-12, and all schools small; eliminate mega-schools, the only justification for them seeming to be the creation of winning sports teams and ability to water-down curriculum with many non-academic "electives" in order to accomidate "teachers" who cannot handle serious academic courses."
I don't think the K-12 system works. Often students are not ready to be advanced to the next grade in all areas, but they are sent ahead anyway. Other times they are more advanced in some areas than in others. The old one-room schoolhouse where classes were taught on a particular level more or less regardless of student age were probably more effective. This is the model we use in the Ben Carson Lifetime Scholars program. If (as has been the case in the past) you have a 7th-grader who proves that he knows as much or as little algebra as a 10th-grader, why shouldn't they be placed in the same algebra class?
"1e. Make all K-12 curricula standard "old school" core academic courses; no more "electives."
1f. Create Trade Schools and Goofoff centers for students who refuse to participate in regular schools. At Trade Schools, students who refuse to participate in mandatory old-school curricula can learn how to weld and bake cakes, along with some rudimentary math, reading, and writing classes. Student who refuse to at least participate at a Trade school will go to a Goofoff center to play basketball all day. Students at Goofoff centers or Trade schools can always work their way back to regular schools."
These are good ideas.
"1g. Eliminate mandatory attendance. Students who refuse to participate in regular schools will to to Trade school or Goofoff center."
I don't completly agree with this. You at least have to mandate that the students go to the Goofoff center or trade school if they won't go to regular school. And I wouldn't think an free-market, libertarian Alger disciple such as yourself would want the public to pay for kids to play basketball without some forced academic instruction. Are you going to toss them out onto the street at 18 with no academic knowledge because you allowed them (nay, paid for them) to waste their childhood playing dodgeball? That is counter-productive.
"2a. Eliminate non-academic majors, such as Education, Social Work, Communications, Journalism, Nursing, Physical Therapy, Criminal Justice, Ethnic Studies, and Business."
As a Communications major, I can say that I partially agree with this, but not completely. The work I did in Communications could very easily have been taught in a trade school and it may have been more practical to tie it to real world businesses in the vein of an apprenticeship program. At the same time, I learned a lot from the core academic classes that I took. However, if it were not a requirement in the course of study in my chosen field, I would never have taken college algebra (not that I learned anything there).
In Canada students are required to go to college - the equivalent of community college - and then have the choice of going on to University or getting a job. This creates a better educated work force. I believe the U.S. should adopt this program.
"3. Businesses: For jobs previously requiring degrees in non-academic subjets such as business, require instead people with degrees in academic fields. Shift training for such jobs as Nursing and Physical Therapy to trade schools."
Business should also accept real world experience as a substitute for degrees. Simply earning a degree doesn't prove you can do a job like experience does.
At the same time, many businesses don't offer enough entry-level opportunity to qualified college graduates with degrees that are slightly different from the core business. For instance, why couldn't an English degree substitute for a marketing degree?
Nadir wrote: "2b. Eliminate all non-basic, profitable research [from universities]. Stop competing with private businesses for research." Isn't this an anti-free market position? Shouldn't universities aid the business community by providing low-cost R&D (including low-wage research assistants) in return for money that is used to fund academic programs?
Actually, the current system undermines free enterprise because it facilitates government spending on what would otherwise be private, profitable research. These subsidies take the form of direct payment for the research, and indirectly providing the massive resources used by business to divert research from their own resources to universities.
The result is a devaluing of the university as a place where scholars learn and teach. I see nothing wrong with the sort of big-money, profitable research that takes place at American universities. But as my hero Tom Sowell says, "Everything worth doing isn't worth doing at a university."
Nadir and sixstringslinger both say: "This is all fine and good, but first and foremost how about hiring people who can teach."
But there is no way to codify "hiring people who can teach." The best we can do is to specify the credentials that represent the best ingrediants for a teacher to have, and then design and impliment training people that will have the best possibility of transforming such people into good teachers.
Currently we use the university system as a job-training center for teachers who take courses in "how to teach," without ever learning anything worth teaching.
This is surely not to say that all people with degrees in Chemistry will make good 11th-grade teachers. But the population of people with chemistry degrees surely represents a richer pool of effective teachers than does a population of peole with education degrees.
If "education" degrees indeed make the ideal degree for a teacher, then that invalidates the very notion that a liberal education prepares minds for all intellectual challenges. If studying history is not as good a preparation for teaching as studying teaching, then all the students are correct when they say, "Why should I study history? I'm going to be a doctor, and that has nothing to do with history."
Nadir wrote: "I don't think the K-12 system works. Often students are not ready to be advanced to the next grade in all areas, but they are sent ahead anyway."
Having all schools K-12 does not equate with "social promotion", which is what you describe above, and which I oppose. I should probably add that as a plank, as well as changing the name of the proposal, so as to possibly attract unregenerated leftists like you.
The Ben Carson Program doesn't use an old one-room schoolhouse, as you describe. Those old single rooms housed all students in the school, regardless not only of age, but also regardless of demonstrated competency. The Ben Carson Program has several rooms, and organizes students into those according to their demonstrated competencies.
I think that you and I agree that this is superior to the current method.
My proposal for having all schools K-12 is so that students will all attend small schools, rather than constantly graduating up to ever bigger schools. The mega-school concept creates many problems for those interested in academics, but solve problems for people who want: good interscholastic sports teams; lots of different electives (to accomidate teachers who can't handle rigorous classes); a thriving social life for students.
I want schools removed from the business of producing championship sports teams, alternatives to core academic classes, and bustling social networks.
"You at least have to mandate that the students go to the Goofoff center or trade school if they won't go to regular school."
Yes. I should have made that more clear. I call for mandatory attendance in one of the three types of facilities, but not in any one of the facilities.
"And I wouldn't think an free-market, libertarian Alger disciple such as yourself would want the public to pay for kids to play basketball without some forced academic instruction."
I do not support total elimination of all "safety net" programs. Holding pens for intractable children during the business day is something that I can support. I would have these facilities offer activities that would provide some academics, including courses that would enable participants to re-enter one of the other systems.
"Are you going to toss them out onto the street at 18 with no academic knowledge because you allowed them (nay, paid for them) to waste their childhood playing dodgeball? That is counter-productive."
As you know from our experiance at the Ben Carson Program, back when we had "mandatory attendance" we had discipline problems. When we started kicking out students a funning thing happened: nearly all of the students who caused problems started behaving themselves constructively.
I predict that the goofoff centers would not fill, but would serve the purpose of protecting serious students from having their efforts undermined. I predict that if today 20% of students in the public school system are goofoffs, if we shunted goofoffs to goofoff centers, most of the goofoffs would stop goofing off, and we'd have far fewer humans turning 18 with "no academic knowledge" than we do now.
Nadir wrote: "Business should also accept real world experience as a substitute for degrees. Simply earning a degree doesn't prove you can do a job like experience does."
Businesses originally valued university degrees for the correct reason: not because such degrees "proved that you can do a job," but because they proved that your brain contained worldly, universal knowledge, and had been excercized as a result.
Somewhere along the way, though, businesses started viewing universities -- and even more sadly, universities started viewing themselves -- as job training centers. The result is that most students now take as majors topics that involve no worldly, universal knowledge, and no deep intellectual exhertion. All they have to show for their college days is training for a specific job.
Notice that though businesses still continue paying for these non-academic degrees, their leaders have started stating that it is more important to "know how to learn" than it is to know any particular set of skills, because job requirements change so much now.
This is why in the long run, businesses will be better off if, for example, their marketting departments hire antropologists and chemsists rather than people with marketing degrees. Certainly universities would be better off if people interested in marketting carreers started majoring in anthropology or chemistry.
Something drastic has got to happen with the university system. It has expanded to include so many mamby-pamby majors that degrees in general have drastically declined in value, resulting the need for people to puff-up their academic standing with advanced degrees. Whereas 50 years ago a BS *MEANT* something, now you need an MS, because 50 years ago 95% of people with a BS had degrees in intellectual subjects, whereas now 90% of people with an MS have had few or now intellectual courses.
Black folks, I'm sorry to report, are the worse with this, with well over 50% (I forget the figure) of their BS degrees consisting of social work, education, criminal justice, african-american studies, journalism, and business. Asian immigrants have the most impressive academic credentials, though they heavily skew towards the sciences over the humanities.
This is all happening while university fees skyrocket. Does it really make sense to spend (or borrow) $40k to have spent four years studying social work?
Correction: Replace "study social work" with "take social work classes."
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