A Continuation Of My Thoughts On Education Reform
I'm glad to see that more high school students are looking into alternatives to college.
I’ve written about education reform in the past. https://aconservativeurbanist.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/70610911?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts
Not everyone is either college material or even interested in college. I know some folks that are anti-college. My grandson is one of them. He’s doing fine as a blue-collar worker. He’s not rich, but he and his wife are doing ok for a young married couple. Both of them are working as many overtime hours as they can handle because they are saving up a down payment to buy a house. It’s going to take a while. One day the grandson said to me, “Pop Pop, I’m going to discourage Jacob (his son) from going to college. Me: “Why is that?” Him: “Because I don’t want him turning into an asshole.”
Joan C. Williams wrote a great book about people like my grandson and granddaughter-in-law:
The following link is to one of the best reviews/synopses I’ve found online. While you should still buy the book, here’s a link to the review: https://www.15minutebusinessbooks.com/blog/2021/05/28/white-working-class-by-joan-c-williams-here-are-my-five-lessons-and-takeaways/https://www.15minutebusinessbooks.com/blog/2021/05/28/white-working-class-by-joan-c-williams-here-are-my-five-lessons-and-takeaways/
In Williams’ book, she says the working classes have no problem with rich people. What they hate are managers. More importantly, they resent being looked down on by the college-degreed, Professional Managerial Class (PMC). In 2016 everything came to a head, and they elected Donald Trump. It was the working classes and lower-middle classes giving the PMC a huge collective middle finger.
That being said, maybe it’s time to fix education. We are still educating our children for a nineteenth century, industrial-based economy, that basically no longer exists. Even with the reshoring of some of our manufacturing, a lot of those jobs are going to be performed by robots. We need to focus on an education curriculum, that educates our students to the best of their ability, for a twenty-first century information-based economy. There are going to be the fast kids, the regular kids, and yes, there are going to be some slow kids. They are going to have to bring back tracking.
Not everyone can become the engineer who designs the robot, or the computer geek who programs the robot. Somebody has to build the robot. Somebody has to run the robot. When it breaks, somebody has to fix the damn robot. If it’s broken, it’s a worthless piece of robot.
The person who fixes that robot is just as important as the engineer who drew up the plans. The plumber who fixes your toilet, is just as important as the engineer who calculated the water flush pressure to turd amount underneath the toilet seat, that you sit on every morning, while you read the paper. The alternative, is a walk along a fifty-yard path, to a small building with a half-moon on the door. The college-degreed Elites, need to remember that, the next time they are sitting on the “throne.” It’s time for our Education Industrial Complex to stop producing so many “assholes.”
David Brooks, an opinion columnist, and supposedly their token conservative at the New York Times, wrote an article on June 4, 2024, called “The Sins of the Educated Class.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/opinion/elites-progressives-universities.html
I don’t always agree with David Brooks. I’m quite a bit more to the right. There are a lot of very good points in the article however, and I recommend it. One passage legitimizes in my mind, a thought that I’ve had over the past few years.
Over the past few decades, elite universities have been churning out very smart graduates who are ready to use their minds and sensibilities to climb to the top of society and change the world. Unfortunately, the marketplace isn’t producing enough of the kinds of jobs these graduates think they deserve.
There it is: “think they deserve.” Entitlement. It’s not just the elite universities either. I’ve also seen it in the state schools. We are witnessing the results of two generations of “everyone gets a trophy.” Sorry, but you are not going to become the CEO on your first day on the job. Guess what? You are not going to change the world. The world doesn’t want you to change it. Don’t create a crisis, so that you can get more money to solve a crisis, that never gets solved.
I’ll reiterate something I’ve said before: Overall, we are still educating our children for a 19th century industrial-based economy, instead of an information-age 21st century economy. Both economies need basically 20% college-degreed managers, and 80% grunts; the Pareto Principle seems to apply here too, like everywhere else. 30% of us have a college degree, in an economy that only has space for 20%. That other 10% is getting angry. There are only so many jobs at Starbucks. That “studies” degree from a private college cost a lot of money. You also have a student loan, that puts you over $100,000 in debt. What kind of job market is there for that degree?
Over at the Liberal Patriot Substack page (yes, I do read liberal blogs. I don’t live in a cocoon.), there is a article that is worth reading.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-education-racket
Here’s a comment in full from a reader of that article. I agree with abbyism 100%.
16 hrs agoLiked by Michael J. Petrilli
Education has managed to become synonymous with success, and those without considerable higher education are shamed in our society. It is embarrassing to work in a factory or in a trade. I recently moved to a new city and was thrilled to find a very smart plumber who can solve the complex problems of renovating an older home, but these folks are few and far between. Meanwhile we keep the doors closed to construction workers from other countries while not producing new workers or respecting those who choose those careers. Same with factory work: we need smart people (not necessarily educated, but SMART) to run the machines that make the goods we need right here in the US. It is all about branding and messaging! The Democratic Party's emphasis on higher education and punditry has alienated those who work at something other than a computer. It's a tragedy.
Yes it is. It didn’t used to be this way. I can remember growing up in an era with a black and white TV that got three channels, never mind a computer. It was a time when you could have a middle class lifestyle, with or without a college education. We were all pretty much in the same income class, living in suburban “ticky-tacky that all look the same.” Most of the mothers, were stay-at-home moms. Back then you could have a middle class lifestyle on one income. It was “Father Knows Best,” suburbia.
The fathers worked a lot of occupations. Mine, was a school teacher with a master’s degree. The neighbor across the street sold cars, next to him, the father was in charge of all the store displays at 5 different Sears stores. Next door was an engineer. A few houses down the street was a building contractor. Another family owned a hardware store, that hand been owned by the same family, since the late 1800s. All the neighborhood kids played together, and most of the parents socialized with each other. There were no PMCs looking down on the contractor. We all went to the town’s public schools too.
There was no war among the middle classes. The PMCs only made a slight amount of money more than the rest of us. If they were living in our neighborhood, they were more than likely corporate lawyers and hospital staff doctors. In other words, they were salaried middle class employees. It was that idyllic post-war time guided by the steady hand of the Eisenhower Administration. Yes, I know, there was Jim Crow in the South. I didn’t experience it, growing up in Connecticut. However, we were blinded by our normalness. We didn’t see it, but there was something growing under the surface too. We were getting along too well. That had to change. The opening act, was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Divide and conquer. That was the plan. The class war, started as a culture war, and worked its way into politics, education, government, and corporate America. Get control of the education system, and you can mold generations to your ideology. The politics, government, and corporate America parts, will then all fall into place.
There was a Marxist movement that started in the 1930s, that slowly worked its way under the radar into our brain institutions: education, law, medicine, the media, as well as Corporate America. Either we were too stupid to see it, or else we were complacent, covertly or overtly. I think in some ways it was both. We need to reverse it, and the way to do it is through the education system.
There are a lot of conservatives that say we should abolish the Department of Education (DOE). I don’t agree. We should change the focus of the DOE. The agency should develop a national curriculum, based on the needs of today’s and the future’s economies. Then, it’s up to the states to meet those obligations. Those should be the minimum standards. If the states want to set their own standards above those, they should be free to do so.
There is no excuse for what has happened to our public schools, especially our urban public schools. Our children are being educated for failure. Why? Is it so the social services industrial complex, along with the judicial industrial complex, can stay in business?
The drop out age should be raised to 18, and truancy laws need to be enforced. We should also have boot camp style boarding schools for repeat offenders. At the same time, start changing the culture, where doing well in school is frowned upon. That’s going to mean a major overhaul of our pre-K through 12 curricula. In order to educate each student to the best of their ability, we are going to have to bring back tracking. I also believe that we need to create more specialized schools, and not just technical (trade) high schools. That being said, we do need more plumbers and electricians. We also need schools that can train the talented musicians among our youth, where they can have an almost guaranteed slot in a major conservatory like Eastman, Julliard, Curtis, or New England Conservatory, and not just to get their master’s. Get students interested in studying the economic products, from design to purchase, that they use on a daily basis, and maybe you’ll have a lot less truancy. Why go to school, when you are going to end up poor, dead, or in prison anyway, because you never learned any employable skills? That mindset needs to change, and it’s only going to change when there is a viable alternative. Oh, and start teaching real Math and English again. The students are still going to need those skills too, in the emerging economy.
Ok, I’ll get off my soapbox.