RoR: Forum

1. It is a problem that we know we have.

2. We copied our system from the Prussians at the insistence of Horace Mann who was impressed with the rigor. It is no accident that the "ABC Song" is from Mozart, as is "Deutschland Ueber Alles."

3. We heard the same thing in the 1890s. I have a clipping from an engineering magazine of the time that speaks highly of the German method of training "scientists" and other technical people to do exactly one thing extremely well. The article suggested that the British and Americans copy them if we want to keep up in the new century.

4. About 15 years ago, I was working for a Japanese company and one of the officers said that he was sorry to be reassigned home because he wanted his kids to benefit from American education. "What about the problems?" I asked. He said that he could name all of the Japanese who had won Nobel Prizes and he asked me how many Americans I could name.

5. I took Japanese for Business at a community college while the Japan Century was still possible. We learned about the Saturday schools and their cram schools and their excellent achievement scores in mathematics in high school and all that. Our instructor said, "But you catch up in college."

I note here and now that the American college system of competition between schools, etc., etc., including the possibility of failure and re-entry or failure in college and success in business, is not possible in Japan. It is true that college education in America is a government enterprise, but it is an enterprise. Cal State competes against SUNY. We draw people from all over the world for this.

As horrible as public schooling is for children, public schooling is falling by the wayside. I believe that the statistics are simply not reported. Perhaps I only see a select group, but what I do see here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor is a widespread abandonment of public education. Anyone who cares about their kids keeps them home, while the vast majority who watch television, including PBS of course, send their kids to public school for the standard sub-standard education. My other educational exposure is with parochial schools. Again, the statistics are not widely reported in the news media.

There is a science fiction fan cartoonist named Alexis Gilliland whose book, The Iron Law of Bureaucracy presents one gem after another. The German general with his crewcut and iron cross says, "The German general staff lost every world war it started and the rest of the world copied the general staff idea."

So, yes, we need to flog our public schools and probably shut them down entirely.

But I will tell you one thing, I learned from Europeans about raising kids. I met this exchange student, a high schooler from Switzerland, and she said that it was appalling how little money the average teenager actually has. Kids spend a lot, but save little. As with the USA, there are limits on passbook insurance, and she already maxed out one account at SWF 100,000 and needed to open another. Now that is a standard to live up to!

Post 1

Monday, August 22, 2005 - 8:11am

Bottom line:

The quality of the school doesn't dictate your ability in a subject (it may retard things for a while.) The quality of your mind and the strength of your resolve does.

When you are finally released from the clutches of the State edukators you should be able to fill in the gaps in your education by yourself. All you need is motivation, and if nothing else, the American job market provides plenty of motivation...

Post 2

Monday, August 22, 2005 - 8:15am

Damned right. My high school never taught Nietzsche or Aristotle or Rand. It certainly didn't teach Unix or even how to cook a good hamburger. I learned all that at a different school, the School of Hard Knocks.

Post 3

Monday, August 22, 2005 - 8:34am

"she had earned only C's in Germany. So, I asked her to show me some of her work and tests she had taken. They were embarrassing to say the least. I could have completed the tests with one eye closed. Perhaps, I am already influenced by university education, but when I remember the questions and assignments we faced in our German graduation exams, known as the Gymnasium, I am still shocked." [Max]

Max, some concrete examples of the above would help - the categories or actual questions she was asked and the categories or questions of your "Gymnasium": your point is too abstract, with no details.

But I agree with your overall point:

This situation is well-known among educators. And I've heard this from many people educated overseas, including my mother who went to school in Belgium and took 4 years of Greek, 5 of Latin, even more years of German, Flemish, English, had history every year - ancient civ, medieval, modern, her own country, etc. And that's in addition to more advanced courses than we take in math and science. And this is all in elementary and in high school.

Our educational system is an embarassment, a ludicrous joke as the comparative tests taken by America and other countries show repeatedly, placing us near the bottom of the developed world.

[ Aside: This, by the way, is why Objectivism (as opposed to an admiration of Ayn Rand's literature and sense of life) will take root on an advanced level in other countries before it will in the U.S.: They are well-educated and we (including most who are interested in Objectivism) are not.

Objectivism cannot spread among morons, philistines, nerds, and yahoos. ]

.......

"what I do see here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor is a widespread abandonment of public education. " [Michael]

In a wealthy suburb or one of the country's most upscale college towns, yes.

""But you catch up in college." [Michael, quoting someone else]

Actually, we don't.

The gaps in reading, writing, math, logical thinking and simple common sense are papered over with bluster, useless knowledge, and political indoctrination...unless you are in a technical or vocational field. And even then, lots of narrow (and stupid) specialists are graduated from Harvard and from community colleges and state schools.

Sometimes I think there is nothing so ignorant as an Ivy League graduate who doesn't know how little he has learned in four years. And I'm an Ivy League graduate.

Once I left college, I have spent over twenty years learning all the stuff I should have gotten in school.

Phil Coates
(Edited by Philip Coates
on 8/22, 8:42am)

Post 4

Monday, August 22, 2005 - 9:36am

Philip "Tweed" Coates opined in reflection: Sometimes I think there is nothing so ignorant as an Ivy League graduate who doesn't know how little he has learned in four years. And I'm an Ivy League graduate.

Well, the problem is that of public education, per se. Again, see the rant from Sarah House on cultural determinism. Homeschooling is under-reported. Rather than wringing our hands over the failure of American socialist education to be "as good as" other socialist systems, we should be pointing out the successes in de-schooling.

By analogy, I offer these quips from a Newt Gingrich stump speech. "... The Germans are a good, bureaucratic people. They want to know what the rules are and the government tells them and they obey. In America, the posted speed limit is taken as benchmark of opportunity. People, these are not advisories from your chamber of commerce. ... Someone asked me after one of these dinners if I didn't think it was terrible that people on welfare sell their foodstamps for 75 cents on the dollar in order to buy booze and cigarettes and whatever else? No I do not. You cannot give an American a negotiable instrument and then complain when they negotiate it for something they want." His point in this speech was that any "reform" must be culturally attuned to America, not to Germany or Japan.

Bill Gates dropped out of college.
Wozniak and Jobs dropped out of college.

Karl Hess dropped out of high school.

Thomas Edison was kicked out of grammar school.

Andrew Carnegie never went to school.

How much clearer can it be?
The failure in American public schools is only the failure of Russian collective farms. Changing the nationality of the socialists will not bring success. Educating a fraction of their children -- not all kids go to the same schools; they have caste systems there -- in Greek and Latin and training them to differentiate Baroque from Rococco has done little for Europe.

Innovation still resides in America -- and it is not in industry as it was, nor in "science" as it was -- though those things continue, they are not innovation -- but in education as enterprise and in entertainment as enterprise.

Post 5

Monday, August 22, 2005 - 9:55am

The problem with today's school system is that students are not taught to make connections, to generalize, to understand the wider issues involved in any topics. Material should be presented to them in a calculated conceptually order, and with proof that validates each stage. This is how you teach the students to think. Here in America the studying material is not presented to the students in conceptual level, but by the method of perception.

It's like a guessing game, right or wrong? Yes or no? true or false, It is ridiculous.

But of course teaching is also based on the predominant philosophy of a nation; this is the most important fact to be taken in consideration.

Pragmatisms must be the reason for our student to score low compared to students of other nations.

ps, I never went to school here, I drop out high school in Italy! very proud of it!

(Edited by Ciro D'Agostino on 8/22, 10:03am)

Post 6

Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 7:41pm

Max --

First of all I want to first point out that this is a brainstorming post.

I agree with you Max. American public education (including university education) is incredibly watered down and this is because the whole process is looked at by parents, teachers and students as simply something you finish in order to get a certificate or degree. It is viewed as a rite of passage. For most Americans it is widely held that there is a strict dicotomy between knowledge learned in school and any practical application of it in a chosen career. Because of this it simply isn't taken very seriously and is viewed only as a purely pragmatic means to an end. The knowledge taught is presented as a set of vague floating abstractions and it is actually looked down upon when a student takes the topics themselves seriously. I have on several occasions even seen teachers indirectly ridicule students who take their classes seriously. Knowledge learned in public school is almost universally viewed as information that is forgetable immediately after the conclusion of the next examination. Because of this very little integration of advanced knowledge takes place.

Now, considering public education and its inherent ideological bent is this necessarily a bad thing? I would say 60% yes and 40% no. It is clear that the average American is a subpar intellectual when compared with his fellow westerners. He is woefully inept when faced with any issue that is outside his specific specialty. He lacks the ability to integrate complex abstractions and he does not have any motivation to do so. On the other hand, the ideas that were preached to him in public school (statism, collectivism, egalitarianism, social second handedness ect ect ect) like all other things he's been taught in school simply haven't been taken seriously. His ideology has essentially remained a very basic form of pragmatism. What this has allowed America to avoid (at least comparitively) is the economically devastating effects of the welfare state and Marxism. The average American is, ironically, better prepared for a free market economy. He is focused purely on specialization and economic production because that is what he sees as truly necessary for him to get ahead. This same idea is also apparent in the regard to how blatently superficial political debate tends to be in the U.S. Most Americans could care less about and have no understanding of the issues being discussed. For the average working American the government simply isn't an important aspect of his life -- and is viewed as a nuisance that takes taxes out of his paycheck. He is, I think less apt then the average German to look to the government for answers to his problems.

- Jason

(Of course that last observation is only based upon about 7 days spent in Germany talking to different Germans while I was in Europe earlier this summer. Those observations may be incorrect. I would be interested to hear your own opinion on this and whether or not it really has any connection to German education. Your country was a pleasure to travel through. It was amazing to me how well most college educated people there (and elswhere in Europe) speak english.)

(Edited by Jason Quintana on 8/23, 7:53pm)

Post 7

Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 8:14pm

Jason Quintana wrote: "For most Americans it is widely held that there is a strict dicotomy between knowledge learned in school and any practical application of it in a chosen career

Jason, I agree with the general perspective, especially as we are talking mostly about high school here. It also applies to some extent to college, as well. However, that dichotomy is not so strong after high school. Furthermore, there is the perspective that education is more than job training. Considering that many of the jobs in demand now did not exist in the previous generation, it is dangerous to be tooled to fit a cubicle that may not exist tomorrow.

I interviewed several instructors at the University of Michigan classics department for a magazine article. Here is part of that:
Another U of M professor who would speak for attribution about careers and classics was Dr. Joseph �Jay� Reed, assistant professor of Greek and Latin. Dr. Reed called classics �a class secret� that needs to be publicized. He said: �The kids who come here thinking that the major or the concentration is tied to the career are not understanding the way it works at a major university. At a school like the University of Michigan, your major will prepare you to do anything. A Wall Street firm not turn down a person with a degree in classics, given the personality and the grades.�

Post 8

Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 8:20pm

Scary - a person who knows Greek is supposed to monitor my stocks?

Post 9

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - 12:10pm

Jason,

Excellent, insightful analysis of American education, both the downside and the upside!

( I might disagree with how widespread the political indoctrination is...but that could be based on my not having had it where I went to public school. )

Phil

Post 10

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - 3:58pm

Philip Coates wrote: "( I might disagree with how widespread the political indoctrination is...but that could be based on my not having had it where I went to public school. )"

Ha ha haha ha Ha ha haha ha Ha ha haha ha Ha ha haha ha Ha ha haha ha
Ha ha haha ha Ha ha haha ha Ha ha haha ha Ha ha haha ha Ha ha haha ha

That's pretty good. May I quote you in a stand-up routine? I am working on a schtick for libertarian gatherings. It will go something like this:
"... no but seriously, folks... You're a great crowd. Hey, anyone here know Philip Coates, the Objectivist? Oh, you do? Great. Philip Coates says that where he went to public school, they did not have political indoctrination. ... Moving right along ..."

Post 11

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - 5:34pm

Michael, you could make it even funnier by saying that when he was going to public high school he wasn't getting any...

...And then say you're not sure that he was talking about political indoctrination.

If I'm going to be even more famous than I already am, you've got to work diligently on your material: There is already a whole school of "Phil Coates stories" in Objectivist and libertarian circles, some of them even true, so your material needs to stand up or you can sit down.
(Edited by Philip Coates
on 8/24, 5:40pm)

Post 12

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 6:02am

I agree . I'm currently a student in the last year of school in India ( private school ) . The syllabus is standardised for all schools which are affiliated with the CBSE ( the Central Board of Secondary Education ) . My school is one such .

Our syllabus ( at least in the sciences ) is better by far ( much more exhaustive , much deeper ) . I can cite examples , if necessary . I still don't understand why parents don't act against the corruption of their childrens' education .

Post 13

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 4:22pm

Aneesh, two word explanation: John Dewey.

Oops, I'm sorry - I shouldn't use foul language in an open public forum.

Post 14

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 4:37pm

Philip-
I had to go through an act of ablution after hearing such vile filth as that name. ;)

Post 15

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 8:48pm

Yeah - Horace Greeley is another of those disgusting names...

Post 16

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 10:35pm

Stop you guys...civility! civility!

Post 17

Thursday, September 1, 2005 - 5:15am