As my 3.5-year-old son creeps toward school age, I think about these issues more and more frequently, even though college is a long way off (at least from his perspective!). Right now he’s in a fabulous daycare/preschool that really lets him marinate in whatever he’s interested in, which right now means drawing, painting, sculpting PlayDoh, imaginative play, and cutting anything he can get his hands on into tiny little pieces.

I worry that as early as kindergarten he will be forced into a paradigm of schooling with which I am increasingly uncomfortable, even though–with the exception of three wonderful years of my undergrad education (at the fabulous Grinnell College)–I am product of public schools and my parents and much of my extended family are or were public school teachers and administrators. I recognize that public schools are different now in this age of high-stakes testing (I graduated from high school in 1993), and that I benefited from being tracked into gifted classes in grades 1-12, so I know I received a much better public school education than did many of the students who graduated from high school more recently.

I wish my husband and I could afford to work less (and maybe we could, once we stop paying for daycare) so that we could at least partly homeschool/unschool our son. It makes me cringe that as a white, middle-class kid, he’s going to be tracked so stringently–as I was–into college prep.

I almost dropped out of college numerous times, even though I excelled in most of my classes. (I finally hit my stride my junior year at Grinnell, which doesn’t have general education requirements.) And now, almost by accident (because I wasn’t sure what else to do) I have a Ph.D. But my husband barely finished high school and is just brilliant. On the one hand, watching my husband, who is a graphic artist and a writer, create wonderful things is inspiring to me when I think about my son’s future, as it offers hope that my son needn’t go through so many years of college if it doesn’t interest him. At the same time, I have seen my husband run up against professional/career barriers when prospective employers require college degrees.

Laura Blankenship hosted a very interesting and broad-ranging podcast conversation yesterday on the issue of credentials inside higher ed institutions and the role of people inside and outside institutions in education, schooling, and unschooling. You might check it out.

It frustrates me, because it feels like the solution is on the tip of society’s tongue, that education could meet a lot more needs…I just don’t know exactly what would need to change. Intuition tells me it has something to do with letting students set the pace and learn what excites them most, with instructors and materials eager to help them. I just don’t know how to get there.

I guess we’re asking whether someone with a bachelors does work valued at over 2x that of someone with a diploma, or whether jobs just have gotten in the habit of offering 2x more because it’s easier than actually reading resumes and looking at portfolios.

It would make more sense for jobs to rely on portfolios or actually resume assessments to see what a person is actually capable of. When automizing and computerizing society, we replaced the process of carefully matching people with appropriate jobs with a somewhat automatic matching criteria A, B and C with automatic placement in job X.

In general, society would benefit a lot from renewing effort in hiring decisions. Hiring the wrong person for a job (and not having a good way to identify this and fix the problem) is one of the most expensive mistakes a company can make. Education does it all the time, by necessity: it’s near impossible to know whether an inexperienced teacher will cut the mustard, and we don’t have good ways of saying “it’s just not working out, we’re going to have to let you go.”

Issues with requiring degrees for jobs that shouldn’t are just fallout from the core problem: weak hiring practices.

Published in 1936, The Saber Tooth Curriculum is satirical commentary explaining how unexamined traditions of schooling can result in resisting needed changes (Guthrie 169). He [Harold R.W. Benjamin] believed education needs to be responsive to the emerging needs of the life experience and he felt education in his time was sticking to teachings of old rather than of present times.

I know you have expressed similar sentiments previously and I do not disagree with you about some of your points!

#1. “It seems to me that higher-ed needs less immediate attention than the primary schools your kids currently attend.” Yes, what goes on in many primary schools is marginal, at best. However, the reasons for that are so complex – structure of the entire system of public schools, constraints as a result of NCLB, etc. AND – the teachers and administrators – who are products of higher ed. It is a system problem that will require a system change in many, many ways. And the lack of accountability on all fronts (do not think NCLB has achieved that) I believe is a result of a lack of common vision of what education should be/do for all kids.

#2.”I’ve witnessed some of the best examples of teaching, learning and progressive education anywhere in American colleges and universities. College/university may be better for more children than say 7th grade.” I, too, had some excellent experiences in my education in undergrad (at Baylor University), but mostly it was an individual professor and his/her belief and approach towards the construction of valuable learning experiences. I had the same experience in high school. The common factor in those 2 experiences? They were private schools. Perhaps that is not significant, but I work in the public school system so I can help shape a better system for the many kids who cannot attend a private school. In addition, I took advantage of any opportunity I could to learn – a quality I got from coming from some influential teachers early on and a home environment that stressed learning on various fronts – music, art, etc.

My kids also disliked (detested in one case) high school and enjoyed college much, much more. However, they were not set-up to navigate their college experience so they got the type of education they needed to unearth their passion; to help them determine what to do in their future. That is not entirely true of my daughter (again, a grad of a private college), but certainly of my son – very bright, very ADHD, very non-conforming. Though it may not be fair to put that on the education system and not on his parents – it was frustrating to see him floundering when even choosing a college. His high school guidance counselor advised him to go to Community college – he was not “college material;” he was “unmotivated” and lazy. Yet, he got through college – almost – and lacks 1 course for his degree. He has attempted it 2 times – College Algebra of all things (and his mother a former math teacher!!). The issue – he sees no relevance, no meaning in it. Attach it to physics – he gets it, no problem. Teach it in isolation – he just cannot make himself stick to it to get through. His last prof begged him to take it again with her – said she knew she could get him through. But, he just ends up feeling stupid and has no tolerance for that. All the talk in the world about just jumping through the hoop has not helped. Now – 2 years later – he is headed back to school. This time to get a teaching degree!! Yet – where he will attend – mediocre at best. The amount of time and money invested is alarming – but I will support him however I can to find his way to uncovering what it is that will give him meaning and a future. Not so sure that would happen if I were not an educator!

So the question – how do we make more of education more meaningful and more relevant to more kids? By the way, I checked out your syllabus – I would LOVE to enroll . . . but have promised my family after this dissertation is finished, no more courses – well, I think I said no more degrees!!

To loosely paraphrase Tom Friedman in The World is Flat:

“There is no more powerful educational tool than a curious child.”

I do think that we need to sometimes learn things that we might not be intrinsically interested in, but I also think that the inherent and obvious shortcomings of the current model are becoming more and more clear and will eventually force us to re-evaluate some very old and deeply held assumptions.

Happy New Year!

The average earnings (US) of someone with no HS diploma is under $19,000. For one with a HS diploma: $28,000, for one with a bachelor’s $51,000, and for someone with a postgraduate degree $75,000. Consider that when you decide to encourage or discourage your kids to go and/or prepare for college.

I can’t remember where I saw this statistic, but the differences in quality within postsecondary institutions was substantially greater than the differences in quality between institutions. It matters a lot less which institution one goes to, and more that one chooses the best that that institution has to offer. This seems to support that there is less need to push HS students through an AP curriculum, but just make sure that they get a good well-rounded education and learn how to learn.

Enrollments in for-profit undergraduate schools are growing at a 20% annual pace, and at for-profit graduate schools at 28% (the latter from a very small base) for the last 12 years. Public and not-for-profit enrollments have been close to flat. Why? One reason could be the focus by the for-profits on providing job skills. What else are they doing right?

It’s often said that college is wasted on the young because they fail to take advantage of the plethora of learning opportunities available on campus (and now online too).

Where is this narrow and desolate higher-ed experience you write about?

Cordially,
J. D.

If you take a look at the syllabus for my Learning and Technology Course, you’ll see that I’m quite comfortable teaching in ways that accentuate people’s strengths and interests while fulfilling my obligation to create opportunities they may not have realized existed on their own. That’s why they employ me – to create opportunities.
Syllabus – http://stager.org/2008/omaet/
Theory behind it – http://stager.org/articles/72_Stager.pdf

My college experience wasn’t idyllic either, but that hardly negates the benefits of higher education or negates our desire for all kids to have the widest, deepest, richest array of learning opportunities possible – all kids – something people like Charles Murray would like to predetermine.

We can argue about teacher credentials some other time. It’s a lousy system better, but it’s the best of bad options.

I need to drive home from Kinko’s now. It’s 4:40 AM and I came here to work because the net is down at home.

Happy New Year!!!!!