I guess that this counts as a rant… I see so many things that don’t work in education, or are under so little practical scrutiny, I wonder if the system can be fixed…
I have been taking undergraduate classes, on and off, since the early 1970’s and there is one thing that always seems to come up in the beginning of any class… I always have an instructor sigh, and begin to rant about how poorly prepared all of the incoming freshmen were. In the first years of my ‘college experience’ I just racked this up as typical arrogance from a self described member of the ivory tower. Over the years I started to see that this wasn’t really the case.
Now, as a newly minted social studies teacher (if an itinerant one…right now…), I can start to see what this is all about. It isn’t really about education; it is about how our society has changed over the years. There certainly are big problems in the whole education system in the USA, but even if you upgrade and modernize the infrastructure, create whole crops of incoming super-teachers (all with impeccable scholastic backgrounds!), even if you create a system of grants and awards for teachers and schools….it won’t really accomplish what we all want…
I’ll tell you a story…
I spent much of the last year teaching in South Korea (mostly middle school…), and found that while there are many different problems that Koreans need to address in their education system, there is one thing that they have over us here in the USA. Their culture is much more cohesive, family structures are much stronger, and the culture has created, over the millennia, a system of familial interlocking responsibilities such that students are profoundly motivated to do well in every class.
When I came back to the USA, I saw that in our culture there is little room for any sort of corresponding upgrades to our families… There are certainly a lot of great families in the USA, with motivated, well intentioned parents and children who will do well no matter what the education system provides. But… the proportions of this group when compared to the rest has changed, it seems to have gone down in numbers…
The USA seems to be in the midst of creating a class system. Many families don’t make education an important enough part of life, and, if only by something like osmosis, these attitudes are easily transmitted to many students…it doesn’t really matter. As a teacher, I don’t know how to fix this.
So, with my little story out of the way, and getting back to the idea that high schools don’t prepare out students as well as they should, I found that this is certainly not just an idea I came up with!
http://www.ehow.com/how_2181132_college-as-high-school-student.html
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6448200.html
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4029
http://friendsofdave.org/node/1071
http://curriculum-issues.suite101.com/article.cfm/not_ready_for_college
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-157587451.html
http://www.aacu.org/aacu_news/AACUNews03/September03/facts_figures.cfm
http://www.vandyright.com/?p=1900
http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/education/18873477/detail.html
