altivo

The quality of public education in the US has been declining for years. One has only to look at literacy levels in the general population or among high school graduates to see this. As a retired librarian I can tell you that requests from high school and college students for audio or video formats of their basic textbooks and assigned readings were increasing rapidly even twenty years ago.

The average literacy level of our adult voters is somewhere between grades five and six, which I find appalling. Surveys after the recent election revealed the fact that voters in general had no understanding of what a tariff is. Queries online asking "How can I change my vote?" were amazingly frequent in the week after November 5th.

Yet the GOP wants to abolish public school funding and the entire Department of Education? (Seems that they fare better with ignorant voters than with those who can read?) I urge you to contact your congress critters now and tell them in no uncertain terms that the Department of Education and its budget that aids in particular schools in rural areas and low income neighborhoods must NOT be cut back or eliminated.

Current Mood: horrified
Current Location: Home in the Oak Grove
Current Music: lap top fan

I keep seeing complaints from people who claim to have been "lied to" about the need for or value of higher education. They feel they've been "cheated" because they sank money and time into a degree that has "done nothing for them."

I've kept quiet about this for a long time, but I think it's time for me to set the record straight.

Yes, you can get a job without a college degree. Yes, you can get a college degree and still not find the job you want. Neither of these situations proves anything about the value of education. They depend instead on the state of the economy, trends in the career fields that can change so rapidly that skills and knowledge that were in demand two or three years earlier are no longer wanted. Betting your money on a gamble like that is risky, and the decision is yours alone.

I've said this before, and more than once: Education and Training are not the same thing.

"Training" is what we do with horses, dolphins, and dogs. They learn to perform the desired actions by rote, at a given signal or command. They may not understand the whole process, or where their part fits in, but they happily jump through a hoop or press a lever at the appropriate time, for an expected reward.

"Education" is broader, more complex, and involves among other things learning to learn. The ability to adapt to change, see the broader picture, find where the block in your hand fits into the puzzle, solve problems, and fix complicated messes. It takes longer to acquire, and you can't get it merely by sitting through some specified number of classes and passing some multiple choice examinations. Having a piece of paper that says you did that doesn't prove that you are educated, qualified, or competent at anything.

Let's consider a specific occupation, one that still seems to be pretty popular here in the US: automobile mechanic. This can be a career, and it can be well-paid. Or it can really just mean that you end up working for hourly wages changing tires and fixing flats all day. Neither of those really requires a college degree, but the difference between being the shop manager or supervisor, or the guy who troubleshoots the really difficult stuff, and the one who just keeps loosening and tightening lug bolts all day depends on personal initiative and outlook. The active interest in what you are doing, a willingness to learn new things, and an ability to make practical decisions will help you advance here. The more experience you acquire, the more you can advance. A technical or trade school can help ground you in the details, but those details change pretty quickly so what you get in school isn't going to see you through to retirement, nor will it get you promoted to general manager (let alone customer relations or some other wider responsibility.) You can't blame the school for that. The trade school can only offer you a stepping stone. It's still up to you to find somewhere to step up with it, and to keep moving.

Furthermore, if there are too many people looking for jobs as mechanics in your area, the competition for the available jobs can be rough. This is where a broader education, such as some business and marketing classes or accounting from a two year community college, can give you a way into the automobile business through a different door, such as sales, advertising, etc.

For long term flexibility and hiring appeal, though, you really need a broader picture and less tight focus. That's where the full college degree applies. No, it's not a magic pass to riches, as so many seem to expect. It's really preparation to adapt yourself to a changing world and variable job market. and once you have a position the ability to see farther ahead and behind and know what is coming next and what your options are.

The decision you make is whether you want to be a trained seal who is suddenly out of a job when the circus shuts down, or the general business manager who can move from the circus to the opera house or the movie theatre using pretty much the same set of skills and experience. An education in which you actively participate, with interest and curiosity, will prepare you to be the business manager. If you expect merely to absorb training passively, you will end up as the trained seal. The responsibility is your own.

There's an old saying: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." The same is true of any kind of education. The teachers and the institution can only do so much. The rest is up to you. And to keep going in any career field, you must take an active part in what you do, and look for opportunities to expand your knowledge and awareness. Only you can do that.

Current Mood: pissed off
Current Location: At work, alas

I guess I shouldn't be surprised so much, as I've been predicting many of these things for some time, but events of the last few days are still coming as a bit of a shock.

The US markets, of course, did as I expected today. S&P lowered the US government's rating from AAA to AA+ on Friday after the markets closed. I expected a panic to brew over the weekend and it did, so that a massive selloff today dropped the Wall St. indexes by over 5%, or as much as they lost in the entirety of last week's madness. This goes to show that, as I've been saying for some time, the markets are no longer underpinned by rationality, but are running largely on emotional or lemming-like forces. The proof appears particularly in the fact that the interest rates on US Treasury bills, the formal instrument of federal government borrowing, actually went DOWN today. This clearly indicates a lot of buying action, generated no doubt by the shifting of large sums of money being withdrawn from the stock markets. But these "investors" (and I use the term very loosely, because I think "speculators" and "gamblers" would be more appropriate) ran from the stock market because the government credit ratings had dropped, and instead put their money right into government loan certificates, lending it to the very institution whose credit rating has just been lowered. This is not rational, it is clear stupidity or at least ignorance. Meanwhile, S&P was running around lowering the credit ratings of other corporate bodies who, the agency said, "had too much of their funds invested in T-bills." So various large insurance companies and banks had their own credit ratings lowered merely because they owned US government debt paper, even while the market itself was demonstrating INCREASED faith in that same paper. Absurd enough to make you cry, isn't it?

A couple of people have pointed out, as well, that with the departure of the US from the ranks of the AAA rated governments, ALL the remaining AAA countries have universal health care. The US was the only AAA country without it, even though we were being told by conservatives that we couldn't afford it and it would bankrupt us. Odd and ironic, no?

I am also bemused by the rioting in London. Not by the fact that it is happening, but by the way in which many UK dwellers are responding. These are people who oppose the actions taken by various Islamic states against their rebellious citizens in the last few months, yet they are calling for similar actions to be taken by the UK government against its own subjects. If you're trying to make my head explode, folks, you won't succeed. But you will make me lose some respect for you. Any riot, once it begins, quickly draws in a criminal element that has no interest in the original cause and is there just to do damage and take advantage of the situation. But that doesn't mean that there isn't validity to the underlying cause. Western governments can indeed be just as oppressive as those in the Middle East, and they do so far more often than they want to admit. The US has demonstrated the same propensities that Assad or Qaddafi have shown us, and has done so repeatedly during its history. But the pot just loves to call the kettle black, doesn't it?

Then, on a much less earth-shaking level, someone who is a reasonably promising writer and otherwise sound tells me that every English teacher he ever had insisted that the construct "John and me" was ALWAYS wrong and should be replaced by "John and I" in all cases. Holy crap, Batman! Has US education really fallen so low? A quick check of Google shows me that this is not what anyone really seems to be saying. Quite the contrary. "Mary cooked dinner for John and I" is still incorrect, just as it always has been. "John and me went to Mary's for dinner" is also incorrect. Surely nowhere in the US, even in benighted TX or KS, is this being taught in schools. Surely? *whimper*

OK, I'll go bed now and try not to think about this stuff.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Location: Home in the oak grove

Meeting in Rockford this afternoon, then the usual evening shift for Wednesday. Temperature down to -7F when I got home. Gary and Red are at a dog class, won't be home until nearly 10, then really late dinner. And tomorrow morning a staff meeting at work, eeeww.

I'm left utterly puzzled by the local college where this afternoon's meeting took place. I mean, I know they've had some really loony administrators for a while now, including a president who ran their finances right into the ground and some who are still there (he left) who seem to think an educational institution has to be more concerned about the paint and carpets than the quality of education it is delivering. They have cheated and bluffed their way around repeated accreditation violations and wonder why their student enrollment is dwindling and their income shrinking. They went for years without a library director, leaving the library in charge of an academic dean who just didn't get it at all. Last summer they finally hired a new director, and he has turned out to be as weird as the rest of them. Apparently he hates books. He's throwing them away, just tossing them in the trash, by the thousands. He's converting the library into what appears to be mostly a collection of computer workstations. He also hates wood, and is getting rid of classic wooden furniture in favor of metal stuff with automobile paint on it. He hates art, and is removing paintings and awards from all the walls. He hates plants, and has ordered all the plants to be removed from the building. He is throwing away materials that other libraries would gladly take, such as a full run of the New York Times on microfilm, all the way back to 1851. There seems to be no respect for traditions, or alumni, or, as far as I can see, for education itself. He's making enemies on the faculty by getting rid of tools and materials that they use for their students. I predict this guy won't be around for long, one way or another, even in that bizarre place. Sadly, this college is more than a century old and was once highly respected.

A law school, a business school, or a medical school may get away with depending almost entirely on electronic resources. A liberal arts college simply can't do that. Too much of classical scholarship in languages, math, literature, philosophy, theology, and history is available only in print formats. Maybe someday it will all be online, but it isn't there now. My advice to students at that institution, or anyone considering enrolling there, has to be to look elsewhere. Nothing good will come of their current direction, and they have persisted in this mode for several years now, so there's no reason to expect they will see their mistake and correct it.

Current Mood: irritated
Current Location: Frozen oak grove

There was a time when books were the exclusive province of the wealthy and the cleric. Neither literacy nor access to the printed word were available to any other socioeconomic class.

Now school administrators in America are deliberately working to recreate that situation.

Exclusive Boston school dumps library completely

No, you idiots, it isn't "all on the internet" yet. Maybe in another century or so it will be, but I doubt it. Buying a few Kindles and circulating them among your students is not a replacement for a library. The number of important works still relevant to education that are not yet available on the Kindle or the internet is still larger than the number that can be found there. A $50,000 coffee shop with an $11,000 espresso maker is never going to serve as a replacement for a real library with a real librarian or two.

It's very obvious that these so-called educators have narrowed down the definition of education to include only "job readiness" and "hireability" and have completely forgotten the importance of breadth, exposure, and serendipity in exposure to literature, history, and, most importantly, VALUES. That last is exactly what these guys lack. I would not send my children to such a school.

Current Mood: angry
Current Location: At work, alas