The Future of Education

I was watching a television program on political campaigns the other day and the Truman/Dewey election was discussed. What stood out about that show was the focus on education and how our US education system needed improvement. This was 1948.

I started thinking about that statement and my experience with subsequent presidential elections including the one just finished. All of them address how a XXXXX (put candidate's name here) administration will address the looming educational issues head-on and "fix" the problem. You can count it--Truman/Dewey, Eisenhower/Stevenson, Eisenhower/Stevenson again, Kennedy/Nixon, Johnson/Goldwater, Nixon/Humphrey, Nixon/McGovern, Ford/Carter, Carter/Reagan, Reagan/Mondale, Bush I/Dukakis, Bush I/Clinton, Clinton/Dole, Bush II/Gore, Bush II/Kerry, and now Obama/McCain. Education was a key election issue. In that time, the Federal government has stepped in to desegregate schools, force teaching school in multiple languages, restricted disciplinary action that can be taken with students, debated religion in schools, debated creationism in schools, debated prayer in schools, closely monitored what can be included in textbooks, and significantly expanded extra-curricucular activities. We've added a formal Kindergarten year to our system. We've added advanced placement classes, computer labs, and a variety of physics experiments to the courses. We've created a totally dedicated cabinet-level position--the Department of Education. Virtually every school system has an elaborate series of achivement or competency tests that students must navigate to progress. In many cases, the testing system has become the object--teachers teach to the test. And we've funnelled countless billions of dollars into the educational system to improve it.

With all this activity over the last 60 years, we have progressed our system so that it produces functionally illiterate people for our workforce. We have graduates who cannot write a coherent sentence. We have workers who cannot make change without the cash register doing the arithmetic for them. We have adults who cannot tell you how many states there are, or the name of the current president. We have adults that cannot tell you the difference among the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. We have people who cannot tell you which countries are in the North American Free Trade Agreement. I suspect this is an infinite list of examples.

In many cases, it doesn't get any better in college. At the graduate level I have seen students unable to write an intelligible sentence. At the undergraduate level I have seen students who should rather argue that the material is not adequate to complete an assignment when they haven't bothered to read the assignment.

There is good news. I have also seen individuals who have just managed to scrape by on high school who are well-read, informed, and keep up with changing technology. The problem is these people do not possess the resume to get ahead. The result is they sit quietly in the background while those less qualified move ahead and set policy for companies, institutions, and country.

So, with the great "progress" we have seen in education since Truman's day 60 years ago, what is the answer and what does the future hold for US education? The future doesn't look good.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]