More on Education!

Well, I got such overwhelming support for my last post on education that I just had to share more! The people have spoken, and they want more of my ill-informed, half-baked ideas!

Actually, this is going to be a more measured, contemplative thing. I was just talking with Amy through the chat feature in Facebook Scrabble (a wonderful forum for political discourse of all kinds) and I got to thinking more and more about education. It's especially relevant to me personally since I work in education now.

And I hate to say it, but the more I think about it, the more I think that we waste too much time and money in this country trying to force-feed a liberal arts education down the throat of every child, in both high school and college. It comes from a wonderful, egalitarian principle, that all people become better citizens of the world when they read classics, understand biology, know a foreign language, etc. etc.

And it's true, they do. I loved my liberal arts education, and wouldn't trade it for anything. But in the thrall of this idea, I think this country may have forgotten to teach the practical stuff necessary to just survive as an adult.

I don't like drawing conclusions about the world from my own, necessarily limited experiences, but I'm going to do it anyway. When I graduated from college, I knew tons about French New Wave directors and American Indian literature. Which is great stuff to know.

What I didn't know was how credit cards worked. I refused to get one when I was in college, feeling that they were evil tools of the capitalist hegemony. And I was right, they are. The problem was that if you don't get one of those evil tools of capitalist hegemony, you can't participate in capitalist hegemony, which means you can't buy stuff. It was hell trying to get my first credit card, and my credit rating still suffers because I waited too long.

And my life with credit cards has been one unpleasant surprise after another. It wasn't just a matter of reading the fine print -- I couldn't understand the fine print. I didn't really know how APRs worked until I got my first punishing service charge. I didn't know that they could charge different APRs for different types of debts, and that when you pay money, they apply it to the lower APR first ... and so forth.

And don't just go and glibly say "parents should teach their kids this stuff." Parents "should" do a lot of things. They're expected to do just about everything. Maybe they'll find time to teach their kids about APRs after they work their full-time jobs, get nutritious food on the table, spend "quality time" with them, strap kids through the age of 18 into safety seats, tell them about the birds and the bees and how they like to fuck ... and besides, they might not really understand APRs either.

And moreover, I'm not a fan of "should" arguments in general. Saying that someone should be doing something doesn't make it happen. Will telling parents they should sit their kids down and talk about APRs make it happen? Maybe, but not as well as making it mandatory in schools. We want results, not buck-passing.

But there's a lot more that kids should learn before becoming adults. How about the issues of the day? Rather than learning about the Edict of Nantes and Linnean classification in high school, maybe I should have been learning about what the federal deficit really means? The whole bit about possibly defaulting on our debt and how much our federal government pays in interest on the debt every year -- that's important stuff to know! Whatever happened to civics classes? I never had a single one. If education is in the business of making better citizens, shouldn't they inform those citizens about the basics of the issues of the day?

The more I get interested in politics, the more I realize how many people are basing their views on a lot of misinformation and a few insufficient bits of real, substantive information. Take government spending, since it's my favorite thing in the whole wide world to talk about. A lot of people think the solution is just that the government needs to "tighten its belt" and cut unnecessary programs and stop paying women for their aborted fetuses which the government then grind up and put in vaccinations that are designed to make all kids autistic or whatever the hell they think. Wouldn't we all be better citizens if we all learned exactly what the government spends its money on? I had to seek this out -- before I saw this I had no idea either. This is 2006, which admittedly is a lot different than now, but you'll get the idea:

20.7%: Social Security
19.7%: National defense
12.4%: Medicare
8.5%: Interest on debt
6.8%: Medicaid
4.7%: Other income security (I don't know what that means)
4.5%: Education, employment and social services
3.9%: Other retirement and disability
2.8%: Health
2.7%: Transportation
2.6%: Veteran's benefits
2.1%: Community development
2.0%: Food and nutrition assistance
1.5%: Justice system
1.4%: Housing assistance
1.4%: Earned Income Tax Credit
1.3%: Supplemental Security Income
1.2%: Natural resources and the environment
1.2%: Unemployment
1.1%: International affairs (including foreign aid)
1.0%: Agriculture
0.9%: Science, space and technology
0.8%: Family support (including TANF, whatever the hell that is)
0.7%: General government
0.2%: Commerce and housing credit

I went out with a girl once who said her daddy didn't believe in taxes because he worked hard to build a business and succeed and his tax dollars would just go to lazy people who weren't willing to be the shining beacon of virtue that he was. I kinda wish that she or he had known how little of his taxes actually went to help people that he apparently would rather let starve (and then go commit crime to survive, and bring up the crime rate and make life worse for everyone ... ANYWAY, I promised myself I wouldn't go on about taxes again. This is supposed to be about education, Chris! Focus!)

The point is that the above should be mandatory learning for every high school student. How can you be an informed voter, voting on how the government spends its money, when you have almost no knowledge of what the government actually spends its money on? Isn't this stuff more important than forcing kids to plow through the dull swamp of "The Scarlet Letter"?

OK, maybe I shouldn't be posing one type of knowledge against the other. What we need is more knowledge all around. That's why the very straightforward and simple answer to our education problem in this country is ....

NO. MORE. SUMMER. VACATION.

OK, maybe you get a few weeks off in July so that each year your family can take a stifling, painful car trip to the Grand Canyon and learn to hate each other again. But when you think about it, it is more than a little insane that we give kids three months off of school for no good reason.

For any political issue, I always find it fruitful to compare what we do to what they go in other developed nations, and no other nation comes anywhere close to how much time off we give our kids from school. And meanwhile, no other developed nation works its adults harder. It's no wonder kids start out lazy and often take a few kicks in the pants by Life before acquiring the work ethic to join the working world. Laziness is what they've become accustomed to.

Think of how much more we could teach kids if we had another three months each year. We could teach them all the Pythagorean Theorems and Iliads and all the stuff we teach them now, PLUS, we could teach them how to balance a checkbook and how home mortgages work. Maybe if schools had taught that sort of thing for the past 30 years, we wouldn't be in the financial mess we're in now.

I hear you saying, but Ed! I mean, Chris! What about helping your family with the summer harvest? And yes, that was the reason we started the big summer vacation in the first place. But last time I checked, there were only three farmers left in this country, and each farmed 30,000,000 acres of corn, and all of it was turned into corn syrup to make soft drinks that made people fat. So maybe that's not such a good reason any more.

But what about the vital summer camp industry? Well, I personally hated every summer camp I was ever forced into, so this whole plan is actually a fiendish attempt to avenge my childhood traumas.

But what about teachers? They already work like dogs for low pay and the only real perk they get is those three months a year when they can decide they're finally going to write that novel about the secretly passionate high school English teacher whose natural artistic sensibilities are crushed by a stifling bureaucracy -- but instead they find themselves using the whole summer to eat frozen pizza and watch "Oprah." Well yes, I do sympathize there. As an accession to them, make the school day shorter. That way, they don't have to work quite as doggishly during the year. Spread that pain out a bit. Maybe give them raises or something too. Buy them off, basically.

And perhaps most important, another thing you can teach kids with all this extra time each year is exactly what the working world is like. What are the jobs? What do people do? I had no idea when I left college. I knew that some people worked in publishing, since I was an English major. I definitely knew tons about the life of professors. And like a lot of liberal arts kids, I figured I would like to be a professor. It looked awesome. Then, to that end, I went on to get even more education that I didn't end up using. In truth, I was too ignorant and frightened of the corporate world. Now I work for a corporation, and it turns out it's not half bad.

I think a lot more vocational training should be in the high schools. I think when you turn 16, you should be able to opt out of any more math and biology and English classes and start learning the ropes in some trade. It can be anything from garage mechanic to paralegal.

I see the failings of our educational system a lot more sharply nowadays, since I work for what is essentially a trade school. We call it a "career college," because we don't want to be confused with those places that Sally Struthers had ads for back in the day that would offer classes in gun repair and panhandling, but still, the best analogy is of a trade school. We offer associate and bachelor's degrees in things like Business Administration and Veterinary Technology and Information Technology and Accounting and Medical Assistant. They're all fields that always have job openings, and that offer pretty solid careers as professionals of some sort.

And we have a hell of a time getting recent high school grads in the door. They all think they have to go off to State U and drink a lot of beer and squeak through without learning anything. Then they graduate with degrees in 14th century basket weaving and start working at coffeeshops, or drop out and start working at coffeeshops. Then in their mid-20s, with a family in tow and a crappy full-time job, they realize they need a real career. So they come to us, and we train them to be accountants and paralegals and business administrators and suchlike.

The adult learners are coming to our schools in droves these days, and I'm happy for them. I'm continually impressed by them, as they sacrifice what little free time they have to bring a better future for their families. But I wish they had gone through all this earlier, when they had fewer other responsibilities. I can't help but think the success of my company is a symptom of failures in the conventional system. Shouldn't these folks have learned about what jobs are available and how to get them in high school, instead of having their brains fed with dreams of keg parties and all-nighters producing dreadful papers about Kafka? Couldn't they have had one class that kind of made them little mini-interns at various real-life organizations, so they'd see what real people do for a living? Maybe they'll think of majors like Accounting or Information Technology earlier, ones that can lead to jobs, instead of going to college with no clue, taking a whole bunch of classes, deciding Sociology is the least painful, bluffing through it, and then being left with a degree but no idea how to use it.

As the loyal readers of my long, tedious rants might be aware, I am a big-government liberal. So I feel a little weird about the fact that I work for a for-profit company that provides education. And one that is, frankly, kicking the ass of the government version. We're rolling in dough, opening new campuses all the time. Our graduates get financial aid at a much higher rate than students at state or private schools (partly because we work very hard to help them get it, and partly because they tend to be poorer). Our graduates also go on to good jobs in their chosen fields after graduation at a much higher rates than students from state or private schools. We are as practical in our approach to education as all-git-out, hiring working professionals to teach the students what it's really like to work these jobs, and what they need to know to do so. And it works.

I don't often like to admit that private enterprise can beat out public, government-run stuff at the same game, but that's exactly what we're doing. And I think it's largely because we're taking a sector of the population who is never going to become a bunch of professors or lawyers or doctors and such, and giving them a direct line to solid, respectable careers.

I think there's a lesson here for public education, namely to get more kids in line for practical, career-focused education at a younger age. This means putting them on a different track than the ones set out for the honors-roll kids, exposing them to a wide range of career possibilities when they're 16 instead of letting them waste time until they're 27. Then get them into a training program like ours, one that's all about how to do a job. Then they can go out and do it.

But even if you don't do any of that, for the love of God, get rid the summer vacation. It's a ridiculous waste of time.