Recently in Education Category
Ok, I exaggerate. It's a headline! Still, it's stunning to read that the headmaster of a fancy Massachusetts prep school is giving away the 20,000 books in the library and converting the joint into a "learning center" containing giant flat-screen TVs and a $12,000 cappuccino machine. Read it and weep here.
Actually this may not be quite as bad as it looks. Students will be equipped with Kindles and the like. If anything the real news here may be that the headmaster is so politically tone-deaf that he thinks it's a good idea to do the whole TV-and-cappuccino rec-room transformation at the same time as he abolishes the library. Why not just announce a new environmental initiative to heat the facility by burning volumes from the library? It's not just eliminating books. It's going green!
Actually this may not be quite as bad as it looks. Students will be equipped with Kindles and the like. If anything the real news here may be that the headmaster is so politically tone-deaf that he thinks it's a good idea to do the whole TV-and-cappuccino rec-room transformation at the same time as he abolishes the library. Why not just announce a new environmental initiative to heat the facility by burning volumes from the library? It's not just eliminating books. It's going green!
Thanks to the Economist, I discovered an interesting report from McKinsey & Co. on the costs of our inadequate educational system. A key finding:
If the United States had in recent years closed the gap between its educational achievement levels and those of better-performing nations such as Finland and Korea, GDP in 2008 could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher. This represents 9 to 16 percent of GDP.Ok, those are small, homogenous countries and maybe don't offer a good comparison. But merely bringing black and Latino students up to the level of white ones in the U.S. would add 2 to 4 points to GDP. The economic consequences of our education failures dwarf the nation's current financial woes:
...the persistence of these educational achievement gaps imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.What a sad story at every level.
The NY Times reports that New York's city council has approved the addition of Muslim holidays to the city's school calendar. The NYC schools have for years closed on some Jewish holidays, as do the public schools in my small town 100 miles from the city (where the number of Jewish pupils is negligible). And of course there are the usual Christian/national holidays.
In my day the NYC schools had a large proportion of Jewish students in addition to what seemed to be a largely Jewish teaching corps. And closing the schools for religious holidays was a bad idea even then! It's still a bad idea, and I don't care whose religion is involved. I can't even understand why any religious leader would advocate less education for all in the parochial cause of a religious event. Instead of adding the Muslims--and thereby opening the door to the Confucians, the Zoroastrians and everyone else--the city council ought to admit that the current policy (holiday closings for some religions but not others) is untenable and just do away with the lot of them. (Individuals could of course stay home for a religious observance as needed.) Bad enough we have religion all around us; let's at least get it out of the schools. They need all the instructional days they can get, God knows.
In my day the NYC schools had a large proportion of Jewish students in addition to what seemed to be a largely Jewish teaching corps. And closing the schools for religious holidays was a bad idea even then! It's still a bad idea, and I don't care whose religion is involved. I can't even understand why any religious leader would advocate less education for all in the parochial cause of a religious event. Instead of adding the Muslims--and thereby opening the door to the Confucians, the Zoroastrians and everyone else--the city council ought to admit that the current policy (holiday closings for some religions but not others) is untenable and just do away with the lot of them. (Individuals could of course stay home for a religious observance as needed.) Bad enough we have religion all around us; let's at least get it out of the schools. They need all the instructional days they can get, God knows.
It's graduation season again and since I've been out of school for awhile (I understand they no longer use quill pens), I'm no less qualified than anyone else to offer advice. Mine is that, in whatever you do, you should aim to become your own boss.
I mean this in every possible sense in which it can be interpreted, but especially with respect to work. What I'm telling you is that your life will go much better if you subject yourself and your appetites to your own command, which I hope is obvious by now. But you especially want to be your own boss in the arena of employment, which should be avoided except for some initial exposure for the sake of experience. Since jobs are scarce anyway, this message makes me the bearer of good tidings. My claim is that the recession is doing you a favor by pushing you along the path of self-employment.
What's so bad about a job? While these are much more remunerative than people realize (they never properly value benefits, paid vacation and employer Social Security contributions), there's a good chance you'd be unhappy, your career will be subject to the whims of people you despise, and eventually you'll get laid off--very possibly when its too late to get anything else paying half as much. In the future, moreover, national health insurance, global competition and other changes will make jobs even less attractive than they are now in relation to entrepreneurship. And working for yourself means the boss will never discriminate, demand sexual favors, pass you over in favor of some ass-kissing jerk or claim credit for your hard work.
Another option, of course, is joining a guild--by becoming a public school teacher, for example, or a university professor. Clawing your way into a guild will offer a measure of the security increasingly absent from the rest of the job market, but involves trade-offs (low pay, bureaucracy, groupthink) that many of you will find intolerable.
I will admit that self-employment is not for everybody. Yet it may well be in your future whether you like it or not. I'm here to tell you that it's not so bad.
PS--Awhile back i offered this advice to grads, and I still haven't gotten an honorary degree.
I mean this in every possible sense in which it can be interpreted, but especially with respect to work. What I'm telling you is that your life will go much better if you subject yourself and your appetites to your own command, which I hope is obvious by now. But you especially want to be your own boss in the arena of employment, which should be avoided except for some initial exposure for the sake of experience. Since jobs are scarce anyway, this message makes me the bearer of good tidings. My claim is that the recession is doing you a favor by pushing you along the path of self-employment.
What's so bad about a job? While these are much more remunerative than people realize (they never properly value benefits, paid vacation and employer Social Security contributions), there's a good chance you'd be unhappy, your career will be subject to the whims of people you despise, and eventually you'll get laid off--very possibly when its too late to get anything else paying half as much. In the future, moreover, national health insurance, global competition and other changes will make jobs even less attractive than they are now in relation to entrepreneurship. And working for yourself means the boss will never discriminate, demand sexual favors, pass you over in favor of some ass-kissing jerk or claim credit for your hard work.
Another option, of course, is joining a guild--by becoming a public school teacher, for example, or a university professor. Clawing your way into a guild will offer a measure of the security increasingly absent from the rest of the job market, but involves trade-offs (low pay, bureaucracy, groupthink) that many of you will find intolerable.
I will admit that self-employment is not for everybody. Yet it may well be in your future whether you like it or not. I'm here to tell you that it's not so bad.
PS--Awhile back i offered this advice to grads, and I still haven't gotten an honorary degree.
A couple of posts down I joked about steroids in Little League, but now this: more and more kids are being held out of kindergarten for an extra year, so that they start school at six rather than five. The reasons are mostly bad, as are the consequences, according to a pretty interesting study from scholars at Harvard's Kennedy School. Some kids gain an advantage by being bigger and older than their peers, but there's a large social cost (not least the lost year of earnings for Social Security). Here's the abstract:
Hat tip to The Wilson Quarterly, which covered this awhile ago.
Forty years ago, 96 percent of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade or above. As of 2005, the figure was just 84 percent. The school attendance rate of six-year-olds has not decreased; rather, they are increasingly likely to be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first grade. This paper documents this historical shift. We show that only about a quarter of the change can be proximately explained by changes in school entry laws; the rest reflects "academic redshirting," the practice of enrolling a child in a grade lower than the one for which he is eligible. We show that the decreased grade attainment of six-year-olds reverberates well beyond the kindergarten classroom. Recent stagnation in the high school and college completion rates of young people is partly explained by their later start in primary school. The relatively late start of boys in primary school explains a small but significant portion of the rising gender gaps in high school graduation and college completion. Increases in the age of legal school entry intensify socioeconomic differences in educational attainment, since lower-income children are at greater risk of dropping out of school when they reach the legal age of school exit. Read more...
Hat tip to The Wilson Quarterly, which covered this awhile ago.
Daniel Akst
