Sunday, May 13, 2018

Is it time to write an Obituary for American Education?

I recently saw this on fB:

There is a lot of truth to this sentiment; in many ways it is a--certain sort of--educational failure that has brought us to this to this pass.  It is a bit preposterous to claim that those of us who deplore Trump's philosophy were educated the right way, and that we need everyone to be educated that way.  But--despite what those in our bubble tell us--the right education should be politically neutral.  People should be able to choose the decisions that will imply moral consequences.  Quite honestly, I think the education system has done a remarkably good job of leaving moral issues up to the citizens.

I was not sure how to respond to this meme, signed by a fellow whose heart is (as far as I know) in the right place.  In any case, I responded as follows:
You can't fix the education system. The constitution guarantees that. Rich families always get the education they want, which is not always good for them (and not at all good for the rest of us).  Poor families get what the rich families want us to get, and that's not good for us, either. I don't want to say that we're screwed, but ... it certainly looks that way.  Our only hope is people who were educated well in some other country, and it looks as if they don't want to come here any more, to teach our kids, now that idiots are in charge.  (It's easy to destroy something that works.)
I didn't have time to think out my response carefully, but a large part of what I said seems to hold up to scrutiny so far.  I have to think about this.


OK, it's later.

I realize I've addressed some of the relevant issues in an earlier post (Education and Our Society).  To summarize, there are different objectives in education that all need to be achieved, and they need to be looked at individually.

A. Citizenship in a complex society--complex because it is a democratic society--requires a significant level of education.  If you're asking why, this post is not going to be detailed enough for you.  Here we're talking mostly of how.  Some of the attitudes and skills we need to have in a citizen requires information and training: do we need an Electoral College?  Should, or even can the President effect policy by presidential orders?  And the most recent puzzler: can a sitting president be indicted of criminal wrongdoing?  How much turnout should there be in an election so that the probability of electing someone whom less than half the electorate is in favor of is less than 50%?  (Actually, even I have not figured out that last one.)  Even calculating the taxes you owe to your local municipality requires some mathematical knowledge.  And, not least, the candidates being elected need to have certain language skills, to ensure that they understand what they're being told, and what they hear on TV, and to ensure that they are able to express their ideas clearly to the people, and of course, the people need to be able to understand what they're being told (and to assess its usefulness).

B. There are significant problems to be solved.  Roads have to be built; methods of waste management have to be made more sophisticated; businesses have to be made less polluting; traffic has to be managed more effectively.  Elections must be held more fairly; results must be calculated more securely and promptly, and the effect of election-day media on the polls must be studied and removed.  All this requires that young folks learn the skills upon which the study of all these problems are built.  Kids do not need to learn to build roads.  But whatever background information road-building requires must be taught early enough.  We cannot plan to educate highway construction workers only with the basic skills needed for road-building.  We can't educate TV producers only with the skills required for gathering and presenting news.  Totally focused education is not practical.

C.  Each person develops interests as he or she ages.  Left to themselves, some young people will build up these infamous bubbles of concern that excludes everything they're not interested in presently.  Ignorance of certain information prevents the individual from broadening his or her interests.  Perhaps a kid is interested in cars.  It would be wrong-headed to not exposed that kid to interests outside automobiles, because it is possible the kid might be a genius at designing planes, or locomotives, or spacecraft, or swimsuits, or toasters, or buildings.

D.  Finally, people would be the better for have options for their leisure time.  Many self-designated 'practical-minded' people may say that educating a kid in leisure-time activities is a waste of time.  Most likely, they say, the kid would not have any leisure once he or she becomes an adult.  (This would certainly be true if the government is controlled by business interests.)

That is enough to start us off thinking about how this education needs to be delivered.  Clearly--at least it is clear to me--that the education required for citizenship: mathematics, reading, writing, history, geography, civics, should be socially funded.  Society needs the citizenry to possess this knowledge and these skills in order to function, and it should be freely available.  (I'm not sure whether we should ensure that it has been learned by tests and rewards and punishments; but kids are notoriously uninterested in taking things seriously without significant motivation.  That is a topic for another day.)

The special skills (mentioned in B), those needed for the betterment of society, those requiring special aptitudes, cannot, and should not, be forced on everyone.  Since when an individual learns these things, it benefits society at large, their teaching should be at least subsidized.  It makes no sense to tell a family to pay through the nose for the teaching of these skills, because many talented kids and their parents may not choose to take up the burden.

The things in paragraph C are a special case.  In a cynical society such as ours (in which every good must prove its worth in some rational way), it is difficult to support its place in the curriculum.  One parent might very well say, I object to putting computer science in the curriculum, because of x.  (The reason x might be anything like: junior's mother and I were bad at math, or we hear that computer people do not get paid very much, or I hear that they're going to invent self-programming computers very soon, and then where would junior be?)  But the child in question could easily grow up to be an amazingly good inventor in the computer area, if he or she had the early training.  On the other hand, some parents who are eager to introduce their child to computer programming might not have the good fortune of the child taking to it very well at all.  Computers don't suit everyone.  But a little experience with programming does no harm, and in fact there is a lot of support for teaching computer logic even in elementary school.  This puts these subjects at least partly in the category of being taught free, and half in being heavily subsidized.

The topics in category D are, on the face of it, suited only to a society where resources are not tight.  (In the USA, resources are tight only because the most affluent among us have become extraordinarily tight-fisted since 1980.  But all the money in the hands of the so-called One Percent doesn't do society much good, nor does it do the One Percent much good.)  There are studies that show that art, music, literature and theater are correlated with higher achievement in many schools, but correlation is not causation, as is well known, and everybody likes to point out.  If that idea is not clear, I will blog on it at a later date.

I believe that education should be universal and free.  I believe that parents should have a certain minimum control how their child is educated, but the curriculum structure should be steered by a panel of experts.  There may be a fraction of the school subjects that is available to reflect local conditions; for instance, in a glassmaking region, there could be a thread of glassmaking-related subjects taught to students in relevant age-groups.  But education should be funded by taxes, except for special-interest education, which it makes sense for parents to pay for, at least partially.

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