I don't know if the education debate has been beaten to death, but I took a walk today, and a number of points suggested themselves to me, so I want to make them here.
First thing that came to me is that we have to settle just what it is we call "education". If it were nothing but basic literacy skills, that would really simplify matters. And you hear employers grousing about graduates who present themselves in the workforce without those basic skills. But we know that we're not settling for that most of the time. We want study skills. We want analystical skills. We want social skills. And the worst part of it is we want the educated student to fit into a standard box. When we test achievement, we don't route people to different achievement tests, we run them all through one standard test. Now what I'm asking is whether this really makes sense. One analogy that suggest itself was what if we insisted that the Special Olympics and regular Olympics merged with both sets of athletes performing in the same events? It seems ridiculous, but with our education system, we seem to set a common goal for all students while we know (or should know) that there's no way they can all make it to the same goal in a fixed span of years. And we're defining those who fall beneath some standard as "failure" which we publish in the test scores. But what happened to "achieving personal potential"? If the fastest marathon I can physically run takes 5 hours, haven't I really achieved as much as a guy who runs one in 2 hours 9 minutes because that's the fastest HE can run? Should I be classed a failure when I've done what I really CAN do? As for the needs of the society, the fact is that society needs a wide array of talents. If it weren't for the poor English-speakers, you'd probably have to arrange a year ahead to have your roof replaced since Latinos seem to be doing nearly all the grunt labor. And though jobs for the intellectually challenged may be low-paying, they are still very important to society. And they can be torture for someone with a restless, inquiring mind. What we need to do is educate people who are most suitable to those jobs so they can handle those jobs. And we need to educate the numerically gifted so they can do our engineering and actuary work. Educate the verbally gifted to do our verbal work, and so on. And not set one particular category as the hallmark of "success". Success is when people are suitably prepared for whatever they can handle that society needs to have handled. I guess every parent wants little Bobby or Suzy to be the next genius, but that's unrealistic, not necessarily in the interests of little Bobby or Suzy, and an impossible task for public or private schools. Of course, if the kid is average or even a moron, that reflects back on the parents genes, so you can understand the suffering such a discovery causes for the parent, but society cannot start faulting the schools because levels of possible achievement sort themselves out along the normal curve. So, if you apply THIS set of standards, are schools really failing? One thing people do is take certain schools that seem to be doing the best and judge all schools against them. But that's illogical. Am I a failure for coming in behind the winner of a race? For example, there's a St Paul school called Capitol Hill Magnet. If you look at the charts, their results are very high, even though 30 percent of the students qualify for free meals. I asked friends whose kids go there, and they told me there are entrance requirements to get in. Your child has to be gifted by some definition. Well, there are many schools that have informal entrance requirements. Such as upper-income parents who can afford the housing in the district. So before you do any comparison at all, , you must make sure you are comparing apples to apples. The fact is that the obstacles to teaching Minneapolis students as so many would like to see them taught are many. They fall across the board from family values to social values to nutrition to genetic endowment. The school district basically puts weights on its ankles and then is faulted for not running fast. I'd like to see the following from the school district: * relevant goals for students, conforming to their skills * efficient administration * measurement against peer districts (not wealthy suburbs) * enthusiasm for innovation (and schoolmarms with rulers are not included) * transparency, so that we taxpayers know what's up I think if they could achieve JUST that, we could give them a ton of credit, even if the future Nobel winners don't credit our schools for their fame. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More http://faith.yahoo.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
