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February 27, 2005

Bill Gates ... right and wrong on education

Bill Gates opened a two-day education summit and had this to say about US high schools:

"Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age," said Gates, whose philanthropic foundation has committed nearly a billion dollars to the challenge of improving high schools. "Until we design them to meet the needs of this century, we will keep limiting, even ruining, the lives of millions of Americans every year."
Now, there is a kernal of truth in what Gates is saying, and lord knows, he is not a stupid man. In addition, Gates does put his money where his mouth is:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $2.3 billion to education since 1999. It has designated $733 million to a campaign for "smaller learning communities" to replace mass-enrollment high schools.
I, too, have written in many places that I believe much of the failure of public schools is that the larger and more impersonal they get, the higher the rate of kids slipping through the cracks. Anyone with kids in a public school with 2,000 or more students can easily recount tales of school administrators who run the gamut of merely to aggressively incompetent combined with a vicious defensive posture that is dismissive of parents and barely tolerant of the students. Gates promotes the ideal of schools with no more than 500 students apiece.

However, there is something he actually misses in all his good ideas.

And that's the students:

he trumpeted the goal of preparing every high-school student for either two- or four-year college programs
Not every person is cut out for college. While we should, indeed, vigorously pursue some of the goals Gates promotes to rehab public schools ... smaller, more responsive, flexible, accessible ... there has to be a renewed realization that college is not for everyone. Why should Johnny be writing a research paper comparing the use of literary devices of 18th century British poets when he would rather be apprenticing to a master carpenter and dreaming of creating his own furniture line? Are we going to have import plumbers, landscape designers, mural painters, mosiac tile setters?

Does it make any sense at all to beat the college drum and ignore vocational training?

Posted by Darleen at February 27, 2005 02:37 PM

Comments

Why should Johnny be writing a research paper comparing the use of literary devices of 18th century British poets when he would rather be apprenticing to a master carpenter and dreaming of creating his own furniture line?

Because everybody should have a basic working knowledge of the culture in which he lives. If you and I sat down for drinks, Dar, we should be able to have a very superficial but fluent conversation about art, literature, history, politics, economics, science, religion … you name it. We've been keeping written records of things for about 10,000 years now. Our children should at least be aware of the things we, as a species, have learned and created.

(I'm huge on education. Education is my #1 hot-button issue. As Social Security is to a retiree and abortion is to a radical feminist, education is to li'l ol' me.)

Posted by: Jeff Harrell at February 27, 2005 04:49 PM

Ah! But you see, Jeff, a good grounding in art literature history, et al, should be happening in HIGH SCHOOL. As it is now, one of the big reasons most kids don't finish college in 4 years is that they are taking ever more remedial classes to teach them the things they should have learned in high school. (the other thing is that colleges make it almost impossible for kids to schedule their classes to graduate on time so they can churn more fees, but I digress)

I have an American History textbook from 1904 that was a New York City public school book for grade school. The level of writing is equivalent to about 9th or 10th grade contemporary texts.

Education is very important to me..but it is not one-size-fits all...Numero Uno is allowing kids to reach their own individual potential ... be it teacher, novelist, programmer, business owner, mortician, artist, or plumber.

I love fields of wildflowers, the heady mix of glorious and humble blooms. We should view children differently?

Posted by: Darleen at February 27, 2005 05:00 PM

- Get 'em out on the paycheck trail early.... yeh....thats the ticket.....start letting them support me in a way I could become assustomed too..... Alas its not to be... Mine is headed for Stanford or MIT... damn brainiac....

Posted by: Big Bang Hunter at February 27, 2005 06:27 PM

- btw Dar....If you're ever unlucky enough to find yourself at dinner with Billy boy don't expect him to pick up the tab.... he's an iconaclastic titwad.... at least he was with me.....

Posted by: Big Bang Hunter at February 27, 2005 06:30 PM

I don't see it that way, Dar. High school kids simply aren't mature enough to learn the things they need to know to be culturally fluent. They're not mature enough to really understand literature, for instance. How can you understand Hamlet if you've never been depressed? How can you understand Romeo if you've never been in love? How can you understand Hemingway if you've never felt a hot slug of cheap whisky slide down your gullet?

Our culture is fundamentally different from the culture of 1904. I have no way of saying whether it's better or worse, but it's different. We've got a whole new class of people that simply didn't exist a hundred years ago: adolescents. It's almost like we tacked on an extra ten years to every kid's childhood. The problem is that we're not adapting our schools to this change. We're graduating kids at 17 or 18 and saying, "You're on your own," when they're not remotely ready for it. My grandparents' generation (maybe your great-grandparents') was married by 16 or 17 and dead by 55. Our lives have been stretched out. We need to acknowledge that.

Hell, if I had the cheat codes for real life, I'd change our public school system so kids would graduate around 22, then give them the option of a course of advanced field-specific study that'd be pretty much indistinguishable from today's master's degree. Or, contrariwise, college would be state- and federally funded and mandatory, and every kid would study the same broad-based curriculum with a solid grounding in the liberal arts.

Posted by: Jeff Harrell at February 27, 2005 11:01 PM