I think people–at least a lot of Dopers, if threads are any indication–would gladly give up having to leave a tip (even if the meal price is more expensive) and dealing with potentially less-than-ideal customer service in exchange for an automatized process. At first the novelty of it alone would be attractive. Then once people become accustomed to it, any disadvantages would be rationalized away.
It’s happened with just about everything else in modern society. At first everyone was mistrustful and resentful of the scary machines ringing up their purchases, taking their bank deposits, and washing their cars. But all it takes is one pleasant encounter and folks are sold.
Don’t know how successful “life skills” training would be, but I know depriving students of the curriculum they’d need to be able to get into college is a GUARANTEED way of keeping them from poor and disadvantaged.
It’s already hard enough being a college student from a disadvantaged high school as it. Shoot, I went to a pretty good high school with a largely middle-class population, and college calculus kicked my behind. I can’t fathom why you think you’d be helping poor kids by making them even more disadvantaged.
“No, kid. Don’t sign up for English lit. You won’t be quoting Shakespeare where you’re heading. Here’s your Life Skills 101 book. We’re going to teach you how to balance a checkbook…even though you’re likely always going to be broke. Why? All the good jobs will be going to all those kids filing into the English lit class, that’s why.”
You may not know this, but schools have historically put the poor portion of their student body onto a different track of low expectations. It’s called tracking and it sucks. Kids should be placed in classes based on their abilities and interests–not on their demographic. Some poor kids–yeah, the ones with crazy names with LaShayShay and DeQwan–don’t need anything but a chance to be smart. The last thing they need is to be shunted onto a remedial, “ya’ll aren’t going to be anything anyway” type of curriculum.
I’m all for courses on How to Be Middle Class. As long as they are ancillary to the courses Richie McRichkid is taking.
I’m not sure that teaching life skills is necessarily better either. Not that I think the teaching of life skills and coping and whatever non-academic skills is a bad thing at all, but it still doesn’t make up that gap between non-poor students and the poor ones without the appropriate skills to succeed in school.
I mean, most non-poor kids show up to kindergarten knowing things like the alphabet, counting to ten, body parts, colors, etc… but the poor ones don’t necessarily show up knowing these things, AND they’re also deficient in things like behavior, coping skills, etc…
How do you propose that these kindergarten teachers teach both sets of skills to the poor kids, and somehow also prevent them from being systematically behind the non-poor students?
There absolutely has to be something done at home; the school systems can’t equalize this stuff for everyone, if for example, one group of parents reads to their kids every night and often during the day, and the other group doesn’t even own any preschooler books at all? (I was appalled to read that a lot of less wealthy and not even poor families don’t even own kid books at all.)
Dopers are not a representative sample. And I have never had less than good customer service in any restaurant above the “fast casual” level. If a robot is going to cook my food and the conveyor belt is going to bring it to me, I might as well eat one of those frozen or shelf-stable meals WhyNot mentioned at home.
People mistrusted machines, but being waited on or pampered was never part of the experience of going to the bank or the supermarket. And none of those machines actually eliminated the jobs of bank tellers or cashiers or car wash employees - places where actual people detail the car coexist along with the “drive your car onto the tracks” machine washes , every bank branch still has tellers along with ATMs and I’ve never seen a store with only self checkout. You want to say automation will lead to fewer jobs as waiters or bartenders , I won’t argue. But they will not disappear like pinsetting jobs did.
Oh come on. There are lots of colleges that don’t require their students to have advanced math and English or foreign languages. Within a 30 minute drive of my house, I could attend either an IU or Purdue satellite campus, and do that with a GED. Not to mention any number of community or tech schools. Not everyone is made for college, rich or poor.
I haven’t been able to find it online, but This American Life had an excellent piece on the role of stress and the ability for inner-city kids to learn. Not just because they were tired or unhappy, but about the actual chemical changes caused by the tremendous stress of growing up poor and desperate, in a home where the parents were addicted or absent. That is the kind of challenge we should be focusing on, not trying to fit everyone into a Richie Cunningham suit.
Certainly, if the ability is there, there should be classes available. But we should be focusing more on counseling and checkbooks. Lots of schools in bad areas have money thrown at them, but the results aren’t there. And if you’re implying that an English lit degree is valuable in an economic sense, then you’re wrong. Not that Shakespeare isn’t important, but in terms of payoff after a four year degree and tens of thousands in student loans…well, that seems like the opposite of what you should be teaching any student.
It always seems like it’s the poor kids who are told that college isn’t for everyone. And it’s always the middle-class and rich kids who are told that they can do whatever they want. Maybe this is part of the problem.
If a student wants to go to a good school–which any good student would want to do–an average curriculum just isn’t going to cut it. By dumbing down the curriculum that poor kids get, you ensure that all of them, from the dumbest to the smartest, are only eligible for remedial programs and second-rate degrees.
I listened to that episode too, and I also found it to be excellent. I’m all for intervention programs for troubled youth. Emphasis is on troubled. Not all poor kids are troubled. And no one on that show was advocating taking away a traditional education from poor kids. You can augment a student’s curriculum without dumbing it down. It is possible to learn trigonometry AND “life skills” (whatever those would be) at the same freakin’ time.
English Literature is a standard for any college prep track. It’s very valuable economically inasmuch as it’s a requirement for getting into college. It would be grossly unfair to deny any student access to such a course just because someone on high has deemed their upbringing potentially “unfit”. If they are troubled, by all means provide counseling services for them. But leave their Shakespeare alone.
(I’m still bewildered by your position. Are you saying that if you went into a poor high school and you found a group of kids studying for their AP calculus exam, you’d think the school was wasting time on them? Those kids would be better off trading that calculus class for a course in How Not to be an Unwed Teenaged Mother? If I found such a group of students, I’d want to do everything it took to keep them doing exactly what they’re doing. If a disadvantaged student expresses the desire to take an advanced class, this calls for celebration since it means the educational system is working against all odds. Rejecting their request would be a travesty.)
I don’t think Sateryn76 is talking about those kids at all. Whether its a wealthy or poor high school, students studying any AP subject or any level of calculus are clearly planning to go to college. There are other kids, though, who aren’t planning to go to college. Maybe they don’t think they can go to college because they only took the minimum math and science required to graduate from high school. Maybe they just never considered going to college. Maybe their parents don’t think it’s important for them to go to college. Maybe their parents are actually *against *them going to college.
Maybe what *they *need is
with some additional information about community colleges or learning a trade. Maybe then some of those kids will end up taking trig and AP calculus when they wouldn’t have before. Or realize that it’s possible to get a degree without taking calculus, and that if you don’t want to go to college, you’re better off learning a trade than trying to find a good job with nothing more than a high school diploma.
There's always a lot of focus on adding AP courses, smaller classes and better teachers to poorly performing schools. Well, smaller classes and better teachers might help provide a better education, but I went to what was on paper, a terrible high school. Low graduation rate, low college attendance rate ,high dropout rate. You could have spent a fortune adding more AP classes- and it sure would have helped the twenty-five of us who took them. An additional college counselor would have helped the hundred or so of us who at least started college. Neither of those would have done anything for the other five or six hundred students ,though. And they actually *needed *the help more than those who were already taking AP classes
Bolding mine, just so you can see what raised my ire.
We need proof that “bad” schools put unreasonable pressure on kids to get into advanced mathematics or that they direct extra funding to teachers teaching advanced course material instead of, say, guidance counselors. I’ve never heard of such a thing before. A cite or two would be nice.
And I like how it’s advanced curriculum that gets targeted in this plan, but not, say, athletics or underwater basketweaving. Schools have a number of fluffy electives they could pare back before calculus. And as I said before, if a “bad” school has students taking calculus, it probably needs MORE not less of those kinds of classes. Plucking away traditional classes because the school is “bad” is a guaranteed way to keep that school “bad”. (Would you send your middle class kid to a school that has a load of “inspirational” classes, but just the most basic math classes?)
Thank you for getting at what I was trying to say a little more clearly.
We want to shove evey student into this rigid college track, because we’re thinking (rationally) about the Big Bucks. We do this to all students, rich or poor, and as my generation is finding out, it’s a Big Lie. Certainly, some college diplomas do serve the student well, but it’s often a lucky or logical combination of good job prospects, actual interest and the student’s aptitude. Fortunately, for most students above poverty level who have “normal” parents, even a bad choice of major can translate into a good enough job, as the students has the lessons from home that make the difference - ambition, manners, stress management, etc.
But these kids do not have those lessons. They literally do not know how to budget or where to get certain information or that poor people can be successful. This was the hardest thing for me to understand about the poor - I used to get caught up in the whole “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” thing, and while I still expect people to get it together at some point and help themselves, it took some time and some research to see that it is literally impossible to do that if you have no good role models and no understanding of how to take advantage of opportunity.
I’m not saying that AP classes should be banned. But, as noted above, those classes are only appropriate for a tiny percentage of the students. And it isn’t a matter of just doing a “Stand and Deliver” on the rest of the kids - those kids have no desire or interest in why the hell anyone would take those classes. So we’re leaving out a huge portion of the students to celebrate and push this tiny sliver of kids, and most kids end up nowhere.
It doesn’t have to be a choice of drop out or AP. No one is saying there are no more English classes - many of you are leaving out a big middle ground. And if you think that there’s no room for classes like this, you’re nuts. Starting back in grade school, there’s a lot of room for lessons in stress management and education about role models. NOT EVERYONE IS MADE FOR COLLEGE. It’s true, and it’s true of rich and poor alike. If we could just let go of that 1960s mindset, we could do a lot more with all of the students, not just the ones who embrace the traditionally white, middle class standards of society.
This idea would require a fundamental change to how we administer education in the U.S. Your hypothetical system sounds very similar to the German education system where, after elementary school, there are two tracks one that leads to pre-college and the other leads to the learning of a trade or vocation. Unfortunately, your idea will never, ever occur. It’s much better to “starve the beast” making education worse, so that the fascists can say, “Look! See! Gummint can’t do anything right!”
College graduates still have significantly higher salaries and lower unemployment, period. A college degree is not longer a guaranteed ticket straight to the middle class, but it is very much a pre-requisite. Advising people not to go to college is advising them to choose a path that is very likely to keep them in poverty.
Not everyone is going to be successful, that is true. But let’s see how poor kids with relatively equal college prep resources, and then go from there.