Should we go to school longer?

Great Debates
21

I agree with most of what Sam Stone has said except for making college more expensive. I am not a diehard liberal, but I think that college should be available to everyone regardless of ability to pay.

The problem is that this thread is not about revamping college, but extending school by 2 years, which doesn’t seem to be a good idea. There are schools that have college prep programs for those the need more schooling prior to entering college.

I agree with whoever said that extended education should be open to those in their thirties and forties who have a desire to advance themselves.

As to improving the present school system it won’t get done by giving tests or new courses or better administration. There are only three things that will improve our schools:
[ul][li]Better teachers.[/li][li]Better teachers.[/li][li]Better teachers.[/ul][/li]which means that we need to pay them enough that the good ones don’t leave for better paying jobs in the private sector.

22

<nitpick>
If you’d had the extra two years, you might have **GONE ** to college, had you learned to form the subjunctive tense properly. </nitpick>

continuity eror: A good school system will neither rush nor hold back youngsters from reading. Many are ready at age 4. Some are not ready until they are 6. The school systems I’ve been associated with in one way or another generally introduce letters and numbers in kindergarten and have simple “Dick and Jane” type books in first grade. The excellent schools will encourage those who are ready to go to more advance material and provide help for those who need it – or delay the subject for a while. I’ve never heard before of a school where they didn’t start books until 2nd grade.

23

It might be beneficial to hire more teachers for the school systems and have smaller classes. As an Intern I had 180 students. That’s quite a load. I was also stationed at two schools and had to teach a subject in which I had no knowledge (fortunately it was computers so all they did was type…but still) I was tired and cranky at the end of the day and in all honesty I don’t think I can survive in this career if I had a posting like that. Smaller class sizes means teachers worry less about classroom management and can get directly to teaching individual students, not groups.

24

MLS cooled me off a bit, so I’ll just ask 2 things with regard to starting toddlers & pre-toddlers to read.

  1. What the hell’s a 3 year old got to read about that can’t wait until he’s 6?

  2. Makes them a better reader later on. CITE? Sounds like complete garbage to me. Reading requires a bit of logic and abstract thought which, IIRC, the very young brain isn’t all that skilled at. I was able to read by 1st grade, but I never really “got it” until the material was presented to me properly in my 20s. (anecdotal evidence: My daughter knew her alphabet around age 3 because she learned it as a game, but she wasn’t taught to read until 2nd grade 7-8 years old. Our neighbor kid is the same age and was reading at age 5 because that was required at her school. Now my kid reads circles around her because reading is a game to her, neighbor kid thinks of reading as “schoolwork” and has no concept of reading for enjoyment.)

25

I know that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” However: Both my daughters and I learned to read – fluently and with comprehension – prior to the age of 5, simply by (a) being ready and (b) being read to. We are all passionate about reading. However, so is everyone else in the extended family. My sister was read to from early childhood, too, but she didn’t learn to read until first grade, like everyone else. I wouldn’t bet money on my being any better at reading today than she is.

When the young mind has matured to the point when it’s ready to comprehend that marks on paper can be interpreted as language, it may do so if the opportunity presents. If it’s not ready, NOTHING you do can help. Sort of like when a baby is able to turn over, crawl, stand up, or walk, it will do so (unless restrained), but not before.

Does your neighbor’s family read for pleasure? Do they read to their children? IMHO that, plus the child’s basic innate nature would make more difference than the time when the child learned.

26

Oops, to the OP:

No, we don’t need more years to prep folks for college, we need better years leading up to it. You know all the arguments about using some of the money we spend on cars, professional sports, fast food, designer clothes, etc and funnelling that into education, even if that only means more and better teachers–teachers that aren’t forced to burn out and destroy a huge protion of students that they touch. But no politician will ever be able to get the funding for this. Because people aren’t willing to make sacrifices that make sense. They’d rather forego any childhood development education and get their kid an X-box & a TV, stuff it full of Big Macs, Hot Pockets & Pop Tarts and then wonder why the kid isn’t paying attention in school. Ninnyhammers.

27

If reading to kids at an early age gets them to enjoy reading, then that’s enough reason to do so.

28

Is the main purpose of education to enable the graduate to find a job?

One of the oldest and most selective colleges in the U.S. has as its sole curriculum the reading and exploration of the Great Books of the Western World. I believe I am right when I say that that school has a higher percentage of merit scholars that any other school of higher education in the country. Should the government decease funding for such a school? Should the poor choose to go elsewhere if they had a chance to attend?

Since shifts in the job market are so unpredictable, the job that you begin to prepare for this year may have a glut ten years from now. When hiring someone, I would take my chances with someone who has broad knowledge and perspective – someone who knows a little about the world – and about how to learn independently and think creatively.

If I’m going to hire an engineer or an attorney, I’m going to be looking at education beyond the first four years of schooling anyway.

College shouldn’t be just for vocational training.

I would add just a little bit to your list:

Better teachers with more input into decision-making.

In education, the closer you are to actually working with the students, the less decision-making power you have.

[quote]
JoeSki: I’m with Slithy Tove and would rather have us decrease the required amount of mandatory schooling, and increase the quality of the education we give kids and teenagers. Let them read controversial novels, and even more importantly, controversial history. Give them better written text books that intrigue, rather than the horribly dry drek we give them now. There’s great amounts of room for improvement, it’s just we keep making things worse and worse as to not offend anyone it seems.

I wouldn’t mind my child being presented with provocative, well-researched differing points-of-view of historical events as long as both or all sides that have academic merit are examined. But I wouldn’t want my child being taught a false version of the “facts.”

I am all for better written textbooks! Why not a more humorous tone, for example? Why not some of the little trivial details that fascinate? Public school textbooks are written for the purpose of mass production. Since Texas buys so many school books, publishers have begun to use Texas school book committees as their target audience. For that reason, textbooks all over the country have become more and more conservative.

As for the question in the OP, once you are an adult, it is up to you to choose what is right and appropriate for you. It is not the government’s job.

29

No, college shouldn’t be just for vocational training, but for people who are poor, their educations should include vocational training. Anything else is simply irresponsible. Someone who is going through college on student loans and who has no inheritance or other familial support needs to work when they get out.

Learning great literature is nice, but it doesn’t put food on the table. In that sense, it is a luxury. One that is personally enriching, but then, so is travel, and I’ve done very little of that because I could not afford it, and I would not support government travel loans for the poor to allow them to travel the world to ‘broaden their knowledge’.

Ultimately, the most important thing a poor person gets out of an education is the skill needed to make a living and find a valuable place in society. I’m a firm believer in breadth requirements in university - I’m not saying University should be like a vocational school. But unless you are rich and have the luxury of indulging yourself, it must include that aspect.

When I was going to college, I worked part-time at Radio Shack. My co-worker had a Masters’ degree in English literature. He was up to his eyeballs in debt, making little more than minimum wage, and was despondent. His grad degree in English Lit was a big mistake, but one that all the people around him encouraged him to make, because “it’s an education”.

One of my best friends took a degree in political science. Today he fixes televisions for a living.

A degree in English Lit or political science is a luxury. We’ve encouraged poor people to run themselves into crushing debt to pursue luxuries they cannot afford. We’re not doing them any favors.

30

College costs have increased dramatically in the US (I don’t know about other nations). In fact college is probably the only thing where the actual cost goes up over time. Real estate, medicine and higher education are the major consumer goods that have increased in price and real dollar terms faster than inflation. According to this Yale charged $50 a semester in 1940. I know that back in the 1920s you could get a 60/hr a week job for about $10 a week. Assuming college was $35 a semester then then technically college was more affordable when we had sweatshops than it is today with our $5.15 minimum wage, back then it was 210 hours of labor to pay for a semester of college, now it is 582 hours per semester. I assume public colleges may have been even cheaper. So that argument isn’t really true, college has never been more expensive than it is now and its increasing at 2x the rate of inflation and will continue to do so (however loans to pay for college are easier to get than they’ve ever been). As far as I can tell college the only thing that actually costs more but you don’t get more of it. The other consumer goods that have increased in price faster than inflation (medicine and real estate) have increased in part because people buy more of them. We spend more on real estate because houses have twice the square footage they did 50 years ago (about 1100 vs 2200 now) and we use 3x+ more medicine than we did in the 1950s but college is still about 40-60 classes you have to take to get a degree.

I do agree that there is too much emphasis on ‘college’ nowadays, and we need alot more emphasis on trade schools. Colleges and graduate schools already have a 50-70% dropout rate, telling everyone to go to college will not help the economy or the people it will just intensify disillusionment and make people feel that public funds are wasted.

The fact that India and China are producing more scientific degrees is most likely more due to the dichotomy that people in those countries see between the rich and the poor. The only way to ‘solve’ this crisis in the developed world is to promote grinding poverty and to promote education as the only way out the same way this situation exists over there. This isn’t a very good motivator, it is like hiring someone to shoot at you before you run a marathon. We do not have a shortage of doctors, we have a shortage of medical schools willing to accept them though. I cannot prove this across the board but it would not suprise me if masters and doctorate programs in the sciences also have more applicants than they have openings the same way medical school and medical fields (veternary medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, etc) do.

Also the fact that engineering is becoming an outsourced field plays a role in the fact that less people are studying it (assuming less people are studying it). Why work your ass off in college just to be chronically unemployed?

31

How will better teachers change anything? I have never had a teacher change me, I was lazy in high school and I work in college but the motivation came from inside. The 90+ teachers i’ve had in k-12 and college have not played a role in this transition.

And not to sound like an ass, but what does it matter if Korean kids know a little more about geometry than US kids (I’m referring to desires to improve k-12 education, which seems to be a theme in this thread)? Will that have any effect on the world? Will that change the fact that 80% of marriages are unhappy, that many americans are drowning in debt, or that the side effects of stress make up about 70% of doctors visits? Education for its own sake (at the risk of getting attacked) is not really a good goal IMO. You should seek out education that makes life easier, more productive, and happier. Being able to remember useless facts better than other people won’t really help anyone.

32

Should we go to school longer?

Yes.

33

Well, that settles it then.

34

No. We should go no longer or shorter; we should go precisely as long as we mean to. :smiley:

Honestly, what’s the point? It seems the ultimate goal of an education is a strong and steady career - but it’s very, very important to point out that getting an education and getting a job are two different things. And occassionally, they aren’t even related.

Well, typically they are.

But we tend to mistake the fact that if a degree is a necessary condition for snagging a job, that it must also be sufficient. So, we’ve got a glut of people who got a degree in field X that turned out to be useless, and are now in field Y.

On the other hand, there are those that would go to college as a means to an education - as opposed to a career - but again, a mistake is made in considering that a college degree of any kind is sufficient for a good career.

I would prefer if college is dropped as panacea to employment woes, and trade schools - hell, apprenticeships! - were given more consideration. What you really need to get a good career is whatever in that career is necessary - not just a degree - and that often includes a lot of tiny skills, many of which are enumerated in the Pit.

Here’s my idea, if we must have more mandatory education. Instead of an extra year of more high school - more exams and papers and preparatory work - let’s have career research. A student will research the options available to him or her and really establish what it takes to get and hold a job in the chosen field. Then, they’ll have to work out a general plan that will get them the skills it takes - and likely this will require a 4-year trip to college, but at least this will emphasize that a college degree is just a part of what is required.

Oh, and throughout they’ll be required to listen to life lessons and survival tips from retired workers and jaded cubical slaves. :smiley:

35

Sam, I am so angry at you that I want to cry. I can’t believe there are people out there who actually believe that the bright young minds of this country don’t deserve access to an education because they are poor. There are great minds out there in America. There are great minds in the ghettos. There are great minds on the farms. There are great minds that could change our world, and it is a shame to our nation if we leave them or force them in to mindless work simply because they were born poor. When I think that you are the very one that is against the beautiful, brilliant people I’ve been fortunate to know, who have never been able to reach their potential, it makes a part of me want to die inside.

Colleges are not trade schools. We need to get the trades out of college, and put them where you belong. College isn’t for people who want to be cogs- rich or poor. College is for the brilliant minds of this world that love a subject more than anything and feel they have something to give back to that subject and the world as a whole to learn and research and create. Great minds don’t program hotel service databases or design low-rise office buildings or manage petrol refineries. Right now our halls are filled with computer engineering majors that wouldn’t give a fuck if computers ceased to exist tommorow. They arn’t looking to learn computers, they are looking for a job. Let them go to trade school. Let the people that love computers- that spend their spare time making them, that will be the driving forces of new innovations and that are dedicated to learning and discovering as much as they can- go to college.

By all means make college harder. Make it so hard that only the brightest and most dedicated make it through (although I think everyone who thinks they are up to it should get the chance). But don’t bar the poor. Who knows what we may miss out on.

Of course, this wouldn’t be an issue if we had a more fair education system, instead of a less one. Students used to be able to go to college without debt. Student loans (which, BTW, are actually impossible to default on in the US except for grave injury and death, but the facts arn’t quite as important to you, are they?) are a fairly new phenomena, and this is a trend we can turn back.

I can’t take it too personally. I know that Sam Stone isn’t deriding the poor as much as the liberal arts education in general- he’d probably be glad if the rich gave that up, too…but he feels like he has some kind of authority over the choices of the poor. But the liberal arts education is an important thing. It’s so important that we ask people to get one before entering law or medical (trade) schools. A liberal arts education teaches you how to thing critically and provides an important role in society. What good is to teach people how to make bombs if we don’t learn when not to use them? Where would our world be if everyone knew how to make bridges but nobody could figure out what their impact would be? This is actually quite a problem in India, where there are legions of people who can do the math, but very few who can apply it outside of a textbook setting. Many countries test better than us, but it’s the American adaptivity and know-how that has made us great, not the American method of memorization.

To take things a step further, I believe that the liberal arts education curbs the influence of evil. By teaching people how to examine what they are being told, how to put together different hard-to-grasp concepts, how to gather and convey information and how to think about the future, we can prevent some of the great evils that have swept the world from striking again. More mundanely, it makes for a better voting populace, and educated masses are a great merit unto our nation.

36

even sven: You’ve got me all wrong - I’m a big believer in education, including liberal arts education. I’d love to go back to college and study philosophy, art, economics, literature… Hell, I WENT to college, and busted my ass to do so because no one helped me. Worked evenings and weekends.

My point is that we don’t do poor kids any favors by telling them that they have a right to an education, any kind of education, and we’ll loan them all sorts of money that they won’t be able to pay back if they choose poorly. My point is that a liberal arts education is a LUXURY. Poor people can’t afford luxuries. I know - I was one. I was lucky - I wanted to go into science and engineering, so it was a no brainer for me to pick a field that would support me. But friends of mine thought nothing of taking out maximum student loans to study literature or poly sci, and they paid BIG TIME for it.

My other point is that you don’t need to go to college to be educated. An education starts with a book and some free time. And if you go to college for four years and then stop learning, you will not be ‘educated’.

The prime consideration for poor people should be to give them the tools they need to lift themselves out of their situation. Telling them to borrow money they can’t pay back to indulge themselves in whatever they feel like is simply not doing them any favors.

And I didn’t say the poor should not be helped. I said that instead of giving the college itself funding for general revenues, perhaps that funding should be put into scholarships so that poor kids who excel have a better chance of going to school. And perhaps student loans should be tied to ability to repay, so that it’s easier to get a student loan if you pick a faculty that has a good chance of giving you the tools for a real career.

37

It is true that we need more realism when it comes to student loans. They really are no different than any other massive debt, and yet they are sold to kids like free money. It’s not exactly their fault- college is so expensive that nobody without seriously rich parents who are willing to shell out can go through a four year college without one. Kids know it is bad, but everyone else is doing it and they don’t see any other choice.

But can’t there be some way that we can go back to the days when working your way through college was a possibility? Two year colleges are great, but they don’t provide the same depth of education and facilities. Maybe we can scale back some of the manditory student fees that run programs like dances, radio stations, non-academic special events etc. When I went through college it really was more like a giant summer camp than an academic institution. Some of these programs are great- they give young people the chance to gain experience they’d never get on the outside…like running a radio station or directing a play or organizing a gallery showing…but they arn’t strictly neccesary and run up the costs quite a bit. Maybe a two-tiered fee system would work…

I’m not ready to give up on college. When I started taking my first classes, I was amazed. I had never realized that all four years I spent on high school were totally wasted. There is something about the single minded persuit of knowledge, the focus and challenging yourself and pushing your intellectual limits, and being around a great number of similerly interested and bright people that isn’t often reproduced. I have no doubts that California’s prosperity is in part due to it’s excellent and accessable higher education system, and it worries me that it is being quietly dismantled before our eyes.

As far as the poor, I think the prime consideration for them is the same as the prime consideration for humans everywhere- realizing their human potential. For the vast majority of people of any socioeconmic rung this is amounts to little more than them supporting themselves and perhaps reproducing. For a small group of people, this includes much more- and may involve academic explorations that may not directly benefit society but still have great value. I believe we talked earlier about the merits of the space program- and the concensus was that it is still valuable even though it provides little more than a bit of a raise in the human spirit. Maybe you were right on this. But there are other persuits that are worth doing despite being essentially worthless.

Liberal arts is a luxury. But it ought to be a luxery for society, not for individuals. As an increadably rich country, this is a luxury we can afford. I think that we should find a way to make sure that our resources go to those who can make the most of it, not the ones that happen to be born to rich families. Right now we are spewing this luxury willy-nilly on anyone who can beg or borrow a buck, and of course we arn’t seeing much coming from it. Our efforts are poorly spent on people who are in college by default, or are looking for job training. There are better places for these people. But I don’t think money is the way to determing which is which.

38

“Liberal arts is a luxury. But it ought to be a luxery for society, not for individuals. As an increadably rich country, this is a luxury we can afford. I think that we should find a way to make sure that our resources go to those who can make the most of it, not the ones that happen to be born to rich families. Right now we are spewing this luxury willy-nilly on anyone who can beg or borrow a buck, and of course we arn’t seeing much coming from it. Our efforts are poorly spent on people who are in college by default, or are looking for job training. There are better places for these people. But I don’t think money is the way to determing which is which.”

I think this is still underestimating the importance of education. Yes, you could consider it a luxury, if you compare it to a country where people spend their whole lives collecting wood and hunting for food, and barely making it through the day. But in our societies, our skills and knowledge have taken the place of our daily hunting and provide food, shelter and security. It is no coincidence that there is a clear correlation between the quality of life in a country and the average time spent in school by its inhabitants.

However, I do believe that we should integrate work and learning more. The two have been separated too far. You used to learn a trade by working as a trainee and you would see the importance of the skills in practice daily. Now the two have been abstracted too much. I am a firm believer in life-long learning programmes that exist next to work. I myself am an old-fashioned guy who went through most levels of schooling that society had to offer, but my sister dropped out, started working and from there regained the motivation to learn and got qualification after qualification. By the time I started my work career, she was already manager of a small department. The work I currently do comes from having trained myself as part of a practical hobby (computers).

I have greatly benefited from my education (I majored in English, among others, which is now helping me very much to articulate my thoughts in a language that is not my native language) but from having studied the human mind (among others through minoring Artificial Intelligence and Psychology, and through independent reading/research) I firmly believe that we can increase the effectiveness of education manifold, simply by adjusting it so that it fits better to how people’s brains work.

39

This guy feels that the time required to get an education in our culture has been getting successively longer and longer, but not for the reasons we think:

40

That guy is an economic illiterate. Kids in school ARE unemployed. If they weren’t in school, it wouldn’t be an ‘economic disaster’, because economically, nothing would change. Except, of course, we wouldn’t have to maintain all those schools.

What would be a problem is that kids would not have good educations, and therefore wouldn’t be as productive during their working years. But there is no secret cabal keeping kids in school so they can ‘consume’.