Back To School (Part One)

As the news school year approaches, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at American Education today. As a framework for this, I'm going to be using comments from a poster over at TSM that goes by the handle of Mastiff. He made a list of what perceives as the problems with public education today.

Mastiff's points hit home with me in a number of ways. They really weren't deserving of a simple few comments over there so they will be included in a series of posts that I plan to do throughout the week. Let's get started with the first one!

* Many students are in college who should not be in college. A large fraction of these are simply unprepared, a sizable chunk of whom would have been ill-suited for college in any event; of the rest, those who are able to handle college, their particular aptitude would be better served elsewhere. As it is, we seem to have made it a rite of passage to sacrifice four years of your life, and tens of thousands of dollars, for the sake of a piece of paper.

My views on this have become more radical since I entered graduate school, and truly understood that my college career was little more than an extension of high-school. My understanding of political science (my major) was not much more developed after undergrad as it was when I started. Worse, my experiences as a TA have been horrifying. Very, very few students at my mid-tier state university know how to write well. Many don't know how to spell, even when using word processors! And the classes we offer them are the worst sort of watered-down treacle. It amounts to academic fraud, in some points.

The typical rebuttal to this argument is that college is not a vocational school, and is meant to broaden the mind. My response to this is that first, this judgment is made without concern for the cost of such broadening, versus its actual effectiveness; and second, the students' minds would already be plenty broad except that—

We'll just have to wait until tomorrow to see where this goes but for now, let's comment on his overall point.

It is true that some students simply aren't cut out for college. Not everyone should be given a green light to go. Certainly, there are a variety of different types of colleges to choose from so when one says "college" there are a whole host of definitions. Defining which one to go to, if any, should be done more effectively at the high school level and it is not.

Instructors need to figure out what intrinsically motivates students. As Mastiff astutely points out, their particular aptitude would be better suited elsewhere. If they can find out what they enjoying doing simply for the sake of doing it and not a paycheck, this is usually the start of a better higher education path. Someone who enjoys cars, for example, should go to a vocational school and not be forced into going to college to learn business. Too often in our culture the focus is on what's "better" (which usually means more money) and not doing what you love.

Of course, that's tough to find in a culture that defines success as material gains and that includes Mastiff's thousands of dollars valued piece of paper. College is meant to broaden the mind but the amount of time and money wasted on students who would be better served at other types of schools, if it all, is too great to ignore.

It all comes back to teachers engaging students at higher levels and putting in more effort to direct them down more appropriate career paths. Sadly, we are not seeing this now and, instead, are seeing half hearted thinking (and effort) at best.