The Higher (and Lower) Ed Scam Game

From HuffPo:

Believing the Worst About Schools: A Lack of Logic From Sputnik to Tough Choices

Gerald Bracey

'There is a cottage industry in this country that generates reports devoted to keeping Americans anxious about the future and laying the responsibility for that future on the schools which are never working as they should be. The latest of these scare tactics, Tough Choices or Tough Times, might be the dumbest, least democratic, least reality-based of them all.

The notion that America's schools determine the nation's future developed just after World War II . . .

. . .The schools were hit from time to time in the 1960's and 1970's with other critical reports, but the next big bombshell blew up in 1983, A Nation At Risk. The commissioners who wrote this golden treasury of selected, spun and distorted statistics were, like many Americans at the time, convinced that other nations, especially Japan, were going to eat our economic lunch. . .

The report [Tough Choices] throughout emphasizes the importance of creativity and imagination, but it calls for kids to be tracked into different institutions after 10th grade based on scores from tests that cannot measure creativity or imagination. . .

. . .The nation currently has 9 cashiers, 6 waiters and 5+ janitors for every computer programmer and it has no shortage of programmers. I want some of the commissioners' mushrooms.

This report is another smoke and mirrors trick in what I have come to call the High Skills Hoax, a subject to be dealt with as a separate blog entry."

The High Skills Hoax is a good name for the higher education shell game that has resulted in a relentless but unnecessary "raising of the bar" for many kinds of employment. Careers that required six weeks of training twenty years ago now require two-year college degrees. Four year degrees in some cases have escalated all the way to Ph.D's. And no, that is not necessarily indicative of rising job complexity; computerization, if it is worth worth anything at all on the job, has resulted in jobs requiring less expertise, not more, for most positions. That, of course, is a controversial statement and certainly open to debate. What is not debatable, I don't think, is that expectations for students have been raised so high that virtually no one can meet the standards. What every employers wants is a 19 year old Ph.D with 15 years of experience willing to work 60 hours per week for minimum wage with no benefits, trained to be completely docile and subservient in the work place.

A few years ago I was privy to a locker room conversation between two elderly gentlemen who were lamenting endlessly that today's high school students were worthless beyond the pale; their prime example was one hapless 15 year old who- horrors!- didn't know what the Battle of Anzio was. I challenged the two to give me the low-down on the War of Jenkin's Ear. Neither could. My point to them was that it is easy to remember history if you lived through it; the lack of specific historical knowledge is not necessarily an indication that the schools are going to Hell in a handbasket. I would wager that I could ask the same question of typical tenth graders, including that huge dropout percentage, from 1940 and get similar results.

Then there is always the technology rub-- the typical high schooler today is so much more at ease with various kinds of technology than the WW II generation that the two skill-sets are not even in the same galaxy. However, few of today's students could skin a rabbit and a huge number are befuddled about something like changing a tire.

Every generation has its trade-offs. Mr. Bracey offers an effective post exposing one of the evil trade-offs the Dark Side is trying to foist on the Republic: privatization of education. We already have far too much of that and if this Republic is to long endure it must have three institutions: civil rights for all, a military draft for all, and free public education for all.