The sorry state of 'murrican education.

[LMNO]

Cain, I remember seeing a few months ago a lot of articles arguing against the "standard" (i.e. usually lower-middle to -upper class) American assumption that all kids should go to college.  The points they brought up were ones of crushing debt, a high dropout rate, and overeducated graduates not being able to find work.

I can't recall all the people who were saying these things, but do you think that they might be echoing the conservative position here?

[Cramulus]

ah yes, the testing services industry..

I won't disclose which one, but I work for one of those big four companies. 

I'm in the publishing wing though so we never hear about the testing /scoring services.

And some of those measures are useful, just not all.  The part where it gets REAL fucked up is when a state like CA, who teaches the majority of the ESL kids in the nation, has its own system that was well under way for assessment and needs-based curricular changes, and then along comes some fucked up national system that gets in the way of the state's assessments. 

your state has much more dire problems --- like budgeting!

as I understand it, nobody in CA got new textbooks in 2010-11.

Luckily it's not like your state standards were updated, right? so the old books should be fine! 

[Jenne]

National funding then.  Probably so that state budgets generated by state tax-payer income and property taxes isn't affected by federally-mandated testing.

I work for a testing agency and I help develop testing for the TOEFL.  I could go into why quantitative analysis can be helpful for companies hiring people speaking English as a foreign or second language, but that's not necessarily the issue here. 

The issue is priority--and what is needed in funding public education and preparing teachers in diverse settings in a fair, equalized manner.  Who decides this is a sticky wicket.  Not all players have an equal measure of experience in how to do so.

[Triple Zero]

DP:

I've talked with people, whom I trust, who say they've seen it explicity spelled out in such terms (more than a few of these witnesses are American and British "conservatives", alas of a dying breed who are none too common these days).

In fact, this particular facet of conservative thinking has its roots in the intellectual revolt against the French Revolution.  Not so much Burke (who wasn't so much a "conservative" as an admirably independent thinker who was pigeon-holed into being a "conservative" sometime in the early 20th century) but the likes of de Maistre, Carl Schmitt and so on.

Incidentally, I know more than a few Anglo-American conservatives who are very open about their interest in Schmitt and de Maistre - presumably under the illusion that no-one who went to a private school has actually read these people, or knows what they advocated.

But anyway.  For a movement made up mostly of second-rate academics, the Nouvelle Droit certainly do buy into certain aspects of anti-intellectualism.  Some of them frame it as education = Communism, because, well, educated people tend towards more liberal or soft-left positions, as a rule (and this goes back to de Maistre, again).  Some of the crazier ones then throw in some nonsense about Gramsci and the Frankfurt school, but that is a discussion for another day.

Education has consequences.  A certain level of education is grudgingly admitted as necessary, in such circles, for innovation and so on.  But it is also felt that if the vast majority of people are kept unskilled and unschooled, it will be easier to exploit (in the classic, Marxist sense of the term) their productive value.  This makes perfect sense when you realise how many Neoconservatives are just reverse Communists in expensive suits.

It is also felt that education, especially "multi-cultural" education, makes nations weak, succumb to subjectivism and be unwilling to fight against their foreign enemies.  Which is utterly ridiculous, but there we are.

If you visit some of the more insane rightwing blogs on the internet, you will see this kind of thing discussed openly (especially during the "golden years" of 2003-8).  Rightwing bloggers have a distressing tendency, from a certain point of view, to pick up on the implications and dog-whistles of contemporary conservative rhetoric, and make them explicit.  On the other hand, this makes it much easier to understand conservative rhetoric, especially certain memes which may go unnoticed, because the value-laden assumptions of the audience are not shared with the reader trying to discern them.

Thank you. If you state it like that I can sort of imagine people thinking like this. Terrible people, but somehow I can imagine.

Bastards.

I must mull over this. It boils somewhere.

Does more and better education always make people happier? Looking at what you say education correlates with, it probably does.



And now I gotta learn more about Stigmergy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy It sounds a whole lot like the thing Sheldrake described as morphic field resonance, except for not being pseudoscience.

[Jenne]

Cain, I remember seeing a few months ago a lot of articles arguing against the "standard" (i.e. usually lower-middle to -upper class) American assumption that all kids should go to college.  The points they brought up were ones of crushing debt, a high dropout rate, and overeducated graduates not being able to find work.

I can't recall all the people who were saying these things, but do you think that they might be echoing the conservative position here?

This is actually becoming gestalt in the public education sector as well.  The thing is, you can get TRAINING in a vocation and be set for a career as well.  There's still skilled labor out there that needs laborers. 

So if we turn our minds to the fact that not all kids need college or university but instead a vocational apprenticeship, training, etc., that could work just as well if not better for a larger part of the city/junior college set that seem to be just indebting themselves to the banks rather than getting further ahead in the job sector.

The things I talked about are what I hear most from Conservatives and their legislative counterparts.  That cutting education funding is ok because there's too much there with too little output already.  So buildings are crumbling, class sizes go up, textbooks go unfunded, mandates for special education cut into general funding, etc. etc.

[Cain]

Cain, I remember seeing a few months ago a lot of articles arguing against the "standard" (i.e. usually lower-middle to -upper class) American assumption that all kids should go to college.  The points they brought up were ones of crushing debt, a high dropout rate, and overeducated graduates not being able to find work.

I can't recall all the people who were saying these things, but do you think that they might be echoing the conservative position here?

I think it could be.

I mean, there are real problems with the American college systems, in terms of costs and benefits.  If you're looking for a paying job, plumbing or electrician training is probably worth more than many college degrees (excluding law, medicine and MBAs).  Clearly, something has gone wrong with the system, the insane price increases year on year are testament to that.

But if someone is offering no solutions, just shrugging and accepting it as the natural order of things...then yeah, I think there is an aspect of the conservative anti-education meme in there. 

[Doktor Howl]

It is my belief that there are certain people who are certainly aware and explicity pushing for such an outcome, and a larger group of dupes/willing accomplices who have picked up on the idea via stimergic learning - usually through expensively funded think tanks with impressive (and utterly flawed) papers on such things.

I can name at least one who has said it out loud (our friend Mrs Bachmann).

[Jenne]

ah yes, the testing services industry..

I won't disclose which one, but I work for one of those big four companies. 

I'm in the publishing wing though so we never hear about the testing /scoring services.

And some of those measures are useful, just not all.  The part where it gets REAL fucked up is when a state like CA, who teaches the majority of the ESL kids in the nation, has its own system that was well under way for assessment and needs-based curricular changes, and then along comes some fucked up national system that gets in the way of the state's assessments. 

your state has much more dire problems --- like budgeting!

as I understand it, nobody in CA got new textbooks in 2010-11.

Luckily it's not like your state standards were updated, right? so the old books should be fine! 

I don't know--but it sounds about right.  We had something called "guaranteed educational funding" through Proposition 98--until the Governator took over and stole from it time and again to make ends meet in an ever-increasing needs but always-diminishing budget in Sacramento.  The guarantee of 2/3 of the funding going to education was a stopgap to Prop 13 that took away property tax funding from education and made it solely rested upon the basis of what was driven from tax revenue through capital gains.

So when you have a market driven down as we have the last 5 years or so...you can imagine what happened to education funding.  In the shitter.  We currently fund at the level of Arkansas.

Textbooks usually have a mandated categorical funding, which is rarely flexible.  They've been adding flexibility to the categorical funding measures lately, due to the fact that one year you might have money for textbooks, but none for cleaning supplies.  But you cannot spend on cleaning supplies unless you want to lose your textbooks, etc.  It made no sense.

[Doktor Howl]

ah yes, the testing services industry..

I won't disclose which one, but I work for one of those big four companies. 

I'm in the publishing wing though so we never hear about the testing /scoring services.

Don't feel bad.  I work for Big Oil.

We could get together, though, and heap scorn on those vampires that work for HMOs.

[Jenne]

It is also a basic rule of politics that winning parties reward and empower their supporters, and punish and disempower their enemies.

As previously noted, a large number of teaching staff tend towards liberalism or left wing ideas.

And you already touched on the fact that there's an anti-intellectualism that teems within the Conservative movement--the Tea Party especially seems to eschew anything to do with book learning or studying.  This is right on par with that sector in American society, at any rate.

[Freeky]

This fread feeds my brain something wonderful.   Just thought I'd mention that.

[Cain]

Well, they'll accept some learning, but only from Approved Sources.

Glenn Beck's online "university" seems to be doing alright, for example.  I actually find that a real shame, as it shows there is a hunger for superior, yet affordable education out there - but most of the people who actually provide such resources (the Teaching Company etc) are crowded out by those with flashier marketing techniques and inferior, lower cost products.

Also, I'm currently working in private education, so...

[Suu]

My phone came with a reader app preloaded with a variety of classic literature.

My reaction? "OOOH I CAN READ ART OF WAR ON THE JOHN!"

and then my horrific realization...

Somewhere, some 16 year old just got the same make and model phone from her parents. She went through, and deleted the novels from the reader app to make room for Twilight, text messages, and Angry Birds.


That, right there, is why America is fucking stupid.

[Freeky]

Does anyone who posted ITT have a problem with me sharing all this with people?

[Suu]

I don't mind.