“Why couldn’t we be a site for an alternative energy school? Why wouldn’t we be a training school to support the rail industry? Why wouldn’t we have a design school to look at mass transportation? Why couldn’t we train students in demographics?” she said. “Whatever the relevant needs are for the employment market, we are uniquely qualified to provide workers for those needs.”
More here. The Detroit Public School superintendent. She oversees a school program that has a 38% graduation rate. I talked to someone who works with the school system. The Detroit high school her husband graduates from had four students who were proficient in math out of their graduating seniors.
Four out of two hundred.
Now I have a question. High school graduates need jobs, no doubt. But is there a difference between preparing people to be workers, and preparing people to be citizens? Which should come first? Why?
IMO, school is about education not citizenship. That should be left to the parents.
I think asking if one should come before the other creates a false dichotomy. If education is going to effective, both have to be part of an integral whole.
Darkstar, what do you think about this piece, which is a nice summary of the issue.
Malik, I think you’re right. So the question is, why did she emphasize one rather than the other? And perhaps a related question is–if you’ve got to sacrifice one over the other, which one do you sacrifice?
I’ve read that one before. There is also another “version” that expands this to say that, essentially, the education system was designed to, well, create sheep for easy handling by the government.
Here’s where I’m at with education: the public schools in the inner cities are do such poor jobs that they ought to just stick to the basics and let the parents handle what they should be handling. If they aren’t doing the job, let other people handle that, not the schools.
what are the basics? the decision itself is a political one. she doesn’t say anything about the basics. she talks about EMPLOYERS.
I’m not sure the skills needed are all that different. How good a citizen can you be, if you can’t read very well or handle practical math? Are you going to keep up on current events, follow politics, and form competent opinions on that the politicians say, when your eyes glaze over trying to read a newspaper article? For that matter, how can an able-bodied adult be called a good citizen, if he doesn’t support himself and his family? And how is he going to do that, if he hasn’t got the skills for anything more than grunt work?
I guess you could worry about good history and civics instruction in public schools. But until you’ve made sure your students are strong readers who can handle practical math, I’m not sure how much they’re going to benefit from that instruction. Is someone who never reads a newspaper and doesn’t understand how interest works going to make good decisions when voting? How?
What is the difference between someone who knows how to read and someone who reads critically? Having a skillset is important, and perhaps this is what Darkstar means when he talks about “the basics”. But after we get to WHAT they should know, the question becomes HOW DO WE TEACH what they should know. Both questions are political ones. And the answers lead to different types of graduates.
I’ve always thought the ideal purpose of school — especially public school –was to give basic instruction in several disciplines, including civics. I know in reality, schools mostly focus on so-called fundamentals of literacy and arithmatic to the detriment of art, history, health, science, and so forth. It explains in part why there are so many Gen X- and Yers with plenty of formal education but little knowledge.
There’s one point where I’m in total agreement with Thomas Sowell, and that’s the curricula in public schools isn’t rigorous enough. Actually, it’s antiquated; designed to produce a suitable Jack or Jill for tightening a bolt or a screw. In my experience with inner city and suburban high schoolers, it seems many sense they’re not really being taught anything of value, so they just check out.
I think the principal here is making a case for the corporations to invest themselves directly into public education. It’s now possible for many school districts to accommodate a charter school funded by, say, a Humana for training medical professionals, or a Verizon for training telecom professionals. It’d be a very practical and shrewd political and economic partnership, at the very least.
Particularly because public school budgets, while large, cannot meet the needs of their constituents, having a public-private partnership can work. But what happens when the needs of employers trump the needs of citizens? Is what Verizon wants always good for Detroit?
I think that Sam Adams had it right when he wrote into the Mass Constitution, “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue diffused generally among the body of people is necessary for the preservation of rights and liberties.”
I think that human flourishing is the primary goal of education, but I also think that human condition is that of plurality, so you can’t talk about human flourishing without talking about citizenship and inter-relations.
This is one of those issues DuBois had right, we need to train men as men, not men as laborers. I also think that part of what it is to support public education is to send your kids to public schools, and work with your local public school to make it a school worthy of sending your kids to. It’s easy to write a check or talk the talk, but public education and community responsibility means putting your kids where your mouth is. There are costs to citizenship. We understand that with respect to military service, but we have yet to understand this with respect to our other civic institutions.
Detroit school superintendent owns up to systemic failures. http://t.co/K9Sjbpjq
From the Archives: Detroit school superintendent owns up to systemic failures. http://t.co/K9SeDPiw