usmbguest5318
Gold Member
Yesterday, I attended a panel discussion about the pedagogical design of U.S. middle school and high school education. A key theme of the discussion was that American education systems, in accordance with the notion that the information and skills attendant to preparing students to obtain college degrees are the ones that best prepare students to become middle and upper middle class earners in society.
While that may or may not be so, whether it is isn't what concerned me. I was more bothered by the fact that the panelists, regardless of their view on the role of academic instruction vs. vocational instruction, without exception, discussed solution approaches using an "either-or" paradigm. That they did struck me as bizarre, so I decided to attend the post-discussion reception.
At the reception, I noticed two of the panelists chatting so I approached them and asked them why their lines of solutioneering were binarily structured. For whatever differences they had as go solution approaches, they had the same answer to the question: money.
While they both acknowledged the need, particularly in the Internet Age, for students to achieve mastery of both vocational and "college prep" content and skills, they both explained that federal and state governments don't appropriate enough money for schools to, at a high quality level, deliver both types of instruction. Thus school systems have to favor one or the other. Insofar as academic skills can be parlayed to vocational applications, but the reverse isn't really so, the preponderance of education focuses on academic instruction.
Amazing....That's is where our reticence toward government spending has left us...It is essential that public schools be accorded the funding needed to teach students both academic topics and vocational topics. Moreover, because the world "today" is vastly more complex and fast paced than it was even just 50 years ago. Accordingly, whereas back then (and before) many folks may not have needed to master, say, algebra and calculus, physics and chemistry, history and economics, etc., these days, pretty much everyone does. They do largely so they have the skills needed to make sense of information and arguments that will come their way. Quite simply, as the body of human knowledge grows, so too must the extent of it that students must master in order to thrive in the modern world.
Don't get me wrong. I can relate to wanting to pay less in taxes. What I do not relate to is paring education funding so that school systems must make the above described pedagogical choice they have had to. And I say that as someone who's for the whole of my life paid taxes that in part finance public schools, even though not since the 1800s has one member of my immediate family (direct line of ancestry) has ever attended a public school. Even though my kin and I have not attended public schools, as entrepreneurs, I and they know damn well that most of the people whose labors we purchase as employees or as suppliers of goods and services, and most of the people who will live long enough to vote, will come from public schools.
While that may or may not be so, whether it is isn't what concerned me. I was more bothered by the fact that the panelists, regardless of their view on the role of academic instruction vs. vocational instruction, without exception, discussed solution approaches using an "either-or" paradigm. That they did struck me as bizarre, so I decided to attend the post-discussion reception.
At the reception, I noticed two of the panelists chatting so I approached them and asked them why their lines of solutioneering were binarily structured. For whatever differences they had as go solution approaches, they had the same answer to the question: money.
While they both acknowledged the need, particularly in the Internet Age, for students to achieve mastery of both vocational and "college prep" content and skills, they both explained that federal and state governments don't appropriate enough money for schools to, at a high quality level, deliver both types of instruction. Thus school systems have to favor one or the other. Insofar as academic skills can be parlayed to vocational applications, but the reverse isn't really so, the preponderance of education focuses on academic instruction.
Amazing....That's is where our reticence toward government spending has left us...It is essential that public schools be accorded the funding needed to teach students both academic topics and vocational topics. Moreover, because the world "today" is vastly more complex and fast paced than it was even just 50 years ago. Accordingly, whereas back then (and before) many folks may not have needed to master, say, algebra and calculus, physics and chemistry, history and economics, etc., these days, pretty much everyone does. They do largely so they have the skills needed to make sense of information and arguments that will come their way. Quite simply, as the body of human knowledge grows, so too must the extent of it that students must master in order to thrive in the modern world.
Don't get me wrong. I can relate to wanting to pay less in taxes. What I do not relate to is paring education funding so that school systems must make the above described pedagogical choice they have had to. And I say that as someone who's for the whole of my life paid taxes that in part finance public schools, even though not since the 1800s has one member of my immediate family (direct line of ancestry) has ever attended a public school. Even though my kin and I have not attended public schools, as entrepreneurs, I and they know damn well that most of the people whose labors we purchase as employees or as suppliers of goods and services, and most of the people who will live long enough to vote, will come from public schools.
