Re: Soapbox Time

[Judyth Mermelstein <Judyth_Mermelstein -at- BABYLON -dot- MONTREAL -dot- QC -dot- CA>]

Robert Maxey <Bob_Maxey -at- MTN -dot- 3COM -dot- COM> wrote:
>I experience this daily, and it frightens me. We seem to have a difficult
>time getting qualified people. We occasionally have jobs open and posted
>that go unfilled because most applicants do not have either the education
>or the experience working in the high technology industry.

My turn to declaim!

Much as I share the distress over the abysmal record of schools and students
over the past 30 years, I (like many of you) went through a schooling which
by no means guaranteed that its graduates would be literate and numerate, let
alone proficient in the specifics required by individual industries. In fact,
no school system which does not include intensive one-on-one work with
students who are having difficulties can guarantee their progress, and no
minimally funded school staffed with teachers' college graduates who have no
in-depth knowledge of anything outside the current trends in pedagogy and
their own school boards can ensure that students have the opportunity to
develop their own learning in specialized areas. For all that we bemoan the
indadequacy of schools and teachers, it appears even our relatively affluent
societies are unwilling to invest enough in education.

That being said, the one-roomed schoolhouse with one 18-year-old teacher, a
Bible and a few readers and slates was able to turn out 7th-grade graduates
who could read, write and calculate pretty well...but they also lost most of
their less-affluent and less-able students along the way: they left to get
jobs or work the family farm. However, all of those students were given a
good deal of individual attention, as well as exposed to real literate
writing rather than low-vocabulary babified nonsense. They were taught, among
other things, to notice the beauty of good use of language and the
effectiveness of rhetorical techniques. They were taught their basic
mathematical skills in a way that was meaningful to them --problems about
apples and oranges, slicing pies, etc. make sense even in the early grades.

The modern elementary school, with one teacher of equivalent skills in each
classroom, throws in forty or so children, a pile of textbooks (selected for
their glossy appearance and their publishers' promotional acumen) and an
agenda which emphasizes (variously-defined) political correctness and ease of
classroom administration (all those forms!) over encouraging a love of
learning. Students are promoted along with their age-group to enhance
self-esteem and avoid parent complaints, regardless of the difficulties they
will have if they can't read, right or figure at the next grade-level. In
other words, schools have different social goals from those of the old days.

Skipping over high school which tends to be more of the same, we arrive at
the colleges and universities. These used to be attended only by academically
exceptional students on scholarships or the children of university-graduated
professionals or especially affluent and influential businesspeople. The goal
was to educate for the professions (medicine and law) or for scholarly
pursuits in a given field of study. There was NO question of narrowing down
the material to be learned to fit the exact job specifications of a
particular industry. Doctors, lawyers and professors were expected to be
intelligent, highly literate, well-versed in the affairs of their society,
capable of making informed political decisions, etc.

The college or university of today is expected to provide education in a far
wider range of narrowly defined disciplines, to accept students from highly
varied backgrounds (many of whom cannot possibly repay their student loans in
today's economy and will begin their working years with bankruptcy rather
than a job) and to discard those disciplines which are not profitable on a
departmental basis (but which led to literacy, logical thought, and a sense
of what civilisation is about) in favour of providing industry-driven
training in "retail science", "communications", "cytotechnology", etc. Some
schools manage to retain, say, a basic compulsory course in one's native
language, and an option to take a course or two outside one's narrow
specialty. The academics are miserable because they receive undereducated
undergraduates and turn out graduates who know little more. Industry is
miserable because it pays taxes to support the educational system but cannot
receive a steady supply of pre-trained workers with several years of work
experience already under their belts!

BAH, HUMBUG! I say. That is NOT what education is meant to provide, and the
only way it could provide precisely the kind of worker each industry wants at
the moment would be if the educational institutions were in-house training
facilities within the corporations, following their preferred curricula and
integrated work-study programs. In short, industry training is done well in
countries where the industries invest their money in training apprentices and
employees, and quite badly in countries where industry is unwilling to do so
and expect the ill-equipped and underfunded educational institutions to do it
for them. In countries like Germany where apprenticeship training is given by
industry, colleges and universities can do THEIR job, which is to educate
students in languages, literature, history, sciences and mathematics such
that they are able to walk into their apprenticeship or first job with the
necessarily skills and mental discipline. By preventing OUR colleges and
universities from providing the fundamentals of higher education, we destroy
their mission and risk losing them entirely because they do not adequately
conform to the desires of individual corporate employers.

To put it succinctly, it makes no sense to prune all the buds off a plant and
then complain that it won't flower properly. If we are to retain any pretense
to "Western civilization", we must be willing to educate people to be
civilized first, and then focus on training them for the tasks they must
perform within the parameters for their trade. Otherwise, those same people
will be poorly educated, badly trained tools of the very employers who will
discard them without hesitation rather than invest a dime in teaching them
anything.

<rant mode off>

Judyth Mermelstein,
writer, editor and translator (despite my education as much as because of it)

<judyth_mermelstein -at- babylon -dot- montreal -dot- qc -dot- ca>

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=