“We are shut up in schools and classrooms for 10 or 15 years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Education is a method by which one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.” – Laurence J. Peter
By Dr. James “Jim” Kadlecek
Our formal education system, many believe, is in need of “reform.” That includes primary, secondary and higher education.
Cited as evidence, among other factors, is the dropout rate from schools and colleges. Depending on which of the numerous studies you want to believe, the drop out rate from the nation’s high schools is somewhere between 20 and 50 percent, with urban schools having the biggest problem retaining students. At the college level, statistics indicate that only 54 percent of students have a degree after six years.
There is a lot of finger pointing going on. Colleges tend to blame high schools for not adequately preparing students. The high schools blame the students and the parents for a lack of educational motivation.
Studies that have examined the public-school dropout problem have connected it to poverty, family structure, race, ethnicity, language, residence and gender. Indications are the obvious ones: poor attendance, attitudes toward school, lack of family support, lack of involvement in school activities and getting in trouble with the juvenile-justice system.
From one perspective – the connection more education has to earnings potential – it’s hard to understand why a student would drop out. Department of Commerce stats prove that a high-school graduate earns 50 percent more than a dropout, and a college grad earns twice as much. If students are receiving that very significant data, why would any not stick it out, even if they are bored and think school is irrelevant?
Of course, the answer to that question requires that we all remember what it was like to be a teenager, doesn’t it? When you are that age, you know pretty much everything, and adults are really stupid. You can drive, have just discovered sex and maybe even love, and you think you must be the first one to have ever figured it all out. So forget using logic with most teenagers. Many college students right out of high school are similarly engrossed with “self” and their maturity level is not significantly better.
So is the answer reforming the system of education at all levels? Sure, we know that public schools and universities are hopelessly bureaucratic and over-administered. Educational institutions tend to be self-perpetuating, inefficient, organizational disasters.
Clearly, they need to be reformed.
But will they be? Forget it. Educational institutions are perpetuated by those who have a vested self-interest in them – the teachers, the administrators, the graduates, etc. Universities have succeeded in creating what I call the alumni mythology – the notion that if you were able to graduate, then that school becomes “yours,” identified with you, listed on your résumé, and deserving of your financial and political support. In short, all of “us” who made it through school will not support any major changes at our cherished alma mater. It’s ours!
So we will keep pouring financial resources into the schools and universities, even though the system doesn’t work well for large numbers of kids. As Americans, we always tend to believe that more money will solve problems. Any changes will have to be minor and incremental in nature.
Accepting incremental change
And in that regard, there is some good news to report. At the public-school level, enough thinking people, including many dedicated educators, understand the problem, and while they may not be willing to make drastic changes, they are accepting incremental change, a little at a time – charter schools, vocational training programs, programs targeted toward the 20 percent to 40 percent of students that the regular curriculum doesn’t fit. The beginnings of a truly customized educational system are showing up here and there, one where the curricula is designed to meet the needs, talents and abilities of each individual.
At the university level, my hope is that the educational “market” will cause the schools to make changes. The reader may have noticed that tuition, fees, books, etc. have become increasingly costly. Legislatures around the country are more and more reluctant to appropriate more general-fund tax dollars to higher-educational institutions. Students continue to accrue large student loans to get through school. More students and parents are starting to act like the consumers of higher-educational services that they are.
Eventually, I hope, parents and students who are free to make choices between schools will do even more shopping for good, efficient, price-competitive and convenient colleges and universities. And hopefully (and maybe naively on my part), the universities and colleges will start treating the students as valued customers, instead of commodity bodies counted as numbers.
Learning is not a spectator sport
Having said all the above about our flawed educational systems, I must ask an important underlying question: Does our formal education have much to do with learning to live a useful, productive and generally satisfying life? Well, sure, school has something to do with it – but maybe it’s not the be-all and end-all that many Americans think it is.
We all can point to experiences in our lives from which we learned. For example, in my case, I learned more about government and politics in one year as a
Kadlecek has lived in