Thread: education rant!

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Like so many social issues there are so many factors that enter into evaluating why we are where we are in education, and personal responsibility, today. If next week's election turns out as often predicted, and promised programs are enacted we'll be up to 48% of the population receiving a check of some kind "from the government". But that's a whole 'nother issue. It will be interesting to see if Jim Robinson has any feedback from within the belly of the beast as far as the education thing goes.

Given the complexity of evaluating failing education almost any opinion will have some relevance and will be arguably accurate. We arrive at these from personal experience and prejudice. Personally I think we send our kids of today way too many mixed messages. Political correctness was brought up earlier, and though I don't think many kids could verbalize their feelings I think most thoughtful kids feel in their gut that there's something wrong with most PC messages. Also we put way too much faith in distant institutions to "solve our problems". There's no way some detached bureaucrat sitting behind a desk in D.C., your state capital, or perhaps even in your local school district will have a feel for what each kid needs, much less what our economic structure requires. To his credit, Bill Gates foundation is working to try to fight some of this mismanagement, but even with his substantial financial resources and having some pretty savvy educators running his operation they've found it to be a very difficult task.

Just a couple examples of what I've run into when trying to have a very small impact on "the system". Almost 30 years ago when I was doing automotive service training, we joined in a gov/business program intending to give inner city kids a hand up on starting a worthwhile career. It was a program known as CETA (comprehensive employment and training act). It's intent was for business entities to bring young people into entry level jobs, continue on the job training, and both provide them with the start of a career path and help employers find good, qualified employees. The key word there is intent. At the first meeting I attended with the bureaucrats running the program I was "foolish" enough to ask how we were going to test the kids for their aptitude. In my mind I thought it would be most productive and would likely yield the most success if we took kids with a mechanical aptitude into the mechanical field I was representing. Foolish me................I didn't understand the politics of it. Obviously I was some sort of neanderthal because "everybody knows" those kinds of tests are racist. Absolutely no testing would be permitted, it's a one size fits all world afterall. (You didn't really think I came by my cynicism for government solutions to real problems by accident did you? ) Okay, so no testing, our job was to take a kid who might make a great graphic artist and force him to be a mechanic. Okay, I get it! So then the discussion moved on to goals. Again, foolishly I thought that we would want to make every effort to formulate realistic objectives for what was to be learned, in what period of time, and what the training formula would be. Again, I was sternly repremanded for being out of touch with the objectives. We were told that we needed to enroll X number of kids in the program, and within the arbitrary timeframe, "graduate" Y number of kids (a number very close to X). By this time the smart ass in me had been awakened (he's a light sleeper....). Much to the shock of the other "professionals" around the table, I said "so this is just a numbers game to make the program look good, not to really help the kids or the employers?" Must have hit a nerve as the guy running the program went into about a 5 minute denial rant...........................then proceeded to define the numbers game we were to play. A few short years, and millions of dollars later the program was terminated by Congress for not having been effective. Now, if you know how hard it is to kill any government program, that event alone should substantiate what a stinker this one was.

Example two was not quite 10 years ago. A high school near my shop was being rebuilt. The project took a couple years and bunches of money, but the goal was to build a modern facility to meet what the school board believed were the needs of the community. To my pleasant surprise I learned they were making an automotive training area part of the building stucture. Grand opening came around and to my surprise the building designed and built to be the automotive shops was being used for warehousing. I asked, "when were they going to clear out the temporary storage (oh, foolish me) and start the automotive classes?". I was summarily informed that they weren't EVER going to do automotive training because today's kids just didn't want that, that it was a job for losers, and that there wasn't enough earning potential in automotive repair in a high tech world. Not exactly those words, but that was the message. I looked at this "councellor" and asked if he'd ever been to an automotive repair shop and talked to the business owner/manager to learn what was involved in repairing a contemporary car. He talked in circles for a moment, but essentially the answer was no. I asked him if he had any clue as to the pay range of a highly qualified tech was. Again, he was clueless. When I told him my two top techs were making between $65k and 85k depending on productivity, bonuses, and profit sharing it looked to me like his lunch was about to exit.........one end or the other. This idiot probably wasn't making much more than that himself, if that much. And no, my guys didn't have a college degree, in fact neither did I, maybe that's why we didn't have the same ignorance he did. (yeah, mr. sarcasm got awoken again). When I let him know that at that time we had an annual need for around 35000 new techs each year I knew I was wasting my time, but couldn't help but keep piling on.

Okay, a third. There were two technical colleges near my shop that turned out body/paint repair techs. I worked as an advisor at one for awhile until I figured out that the reason I never hired anyone from that school was that the lead instructor was a pure blivit. The other school provided me with three excellent technicians over time. Not all schools/instructors are equal. In primary schools we have few tools to make those kinds of evaluations. Per union rules, all teachers are equal (maybe not technically accurate, but functionally). We rely on bloated school administrations to do that filtering for us, but they have little to no incentive to do so.

John, to get back to one of your first remarks. In today's world there's no excuse for anyone who values education not to be able to improve themselves, even without the aid of a college degree (not to say college isn't valuable, just that not all of us are cut out for it). To me, the single most important educational tool is the ability to read. With that skill, just about every other avenue of expanded education is accessible. One needs only pick up a book, or go on the internet, there's a world of knowledge out there just "waiting" to be discovered. It's encouraging folks (kids or adults) to want to seek out that knowledge that's the challenge. We are evolving our society to honor the failures and punish the successful..................we are fed that crap everyday during the last two years of campaigning..........well, actually everyday of our lives, it just intensifies at election time. You don't build success by tearing down from the top, you lift up from the bottom.