I this this is spot on. My kids go to a GREAT high school and it is never ranked by the high school “rankings” that are published … and the school says it never wants to be. The claim is they attempt to find the right place for each student and that the higher the % of students who take APs and the higher the % of students who attend 4-year colleges often does not necessarily reflect what is best for the student. The school actually has a pretty social-economic diverse population and also has programs for kids with extra learning and behavioral needs … thinking college is the end all and be all for all the kids is foolish IMO. That said, helping each student find the best path for that individual is a pretty daunting task … especially when as a country we do not have our act together for the post high school tracks.</p>
<p>If Reich is saying that we have a system that is failing most Americans and sakky proves that the vast number of our leaders are associated with Harvard maybe we should elect annasdad student who seeks out the fairly priced college with good academics or BC’s welder.</p>
<p>Gee, I hope not. I have higher aspirations for my kids than lives as <shudder> politicians. </shudder></p>
<p>But a welder as president might not be such a bad idea. That failed haberdasher who became an accidental president back around midcentury did a better job than most of his better-educated successors have.</p>
<p>Aww, annasdad, you beat me to it. I would also be proud to have my son’s become plumbers, electricians, etc, but would never want them to be politicians. They are very much looked down upon within our circle. </p>
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I disagree. Have you ever had a pipe burst? </p>
<p>BTW, our val is going to Harvard, but I only know that because he is good friends with my son.</p>
<p>Whatever your kid ends up doing in life, having skills to do “manual labor” is part of their future success. Kids need to know how to swing a hammer, use a saw and screwdriver and unstop a sink. Never pay someone to do something you can do yourself. People today seem woefully unprepared to figure out why their mower stopped working or fix a disposal that gets stopped up. If people are looking down on those tasks, they had better be prepared to make a crapload of money to pay the people they looked down on to do!</p>
<p>^ Agree wholeheartedly. When our local school district woke up to the fact that it was running out of money 10 years ago, the first two things to get cut were the vocal music/drama program and shop. The justification for cutting shop was that there is a very good vocational school that the kids who want to prepare for those types of careers can go to, so why do we need shop?</p>
<p>My argument was (and is) that that’s fine for the kids who want to go on to vocational careers - but what about the college-bound kid who needs at least a few practical skills? I’m a poster child for the need. My dad was a brilliant historian, but the poor man could literally not drive a nail (or, later in life, figure out how to get money out of an ATM). What I know about practical matters, an area I admit to being deficient in, I learned in junior high and high school shop - and I was on a college prep track.</p>
<p>But the arguments fell on deaf ears. Full funding for the soccer team was deemed more important.</p>
<p>I loved being a plumber. I have my journeyman’s license and it’s a great skill to have. I’ve also got a genius IQ and a 3.8 GPA in college. I still haven’t ruled out becoming a master plumber. I am getting the degrees because I don’t know if I could physically do plumbing for years due to knee problems. I hate that the trades are looked down on. Absolutely hate it. You can’t pass the master test if you’re not intelligent. I wish more people understood that. </p>
<p>And yes, it’s almost frightening to me how many people can’t figure out how to work a plunger (or insert simple task here). I don’t know how some people function if they have to call a professional every time something little goes wrong. Who has that kind of time and money? Hmmm…</p>
<p>Just kidding; but I did really screw things up once trying to replace a faucet. When I finally gave up and called a plumber, he very kindly informed me that I’d turned a 20-minute job for him into an hour.</p>
<p>And I’m not fooling DW. We need to replace our porch. I volunteered to do it. “Not on my house, you don’t,” was the response.</p>
<p>In the article, Reich doesn’t say what we should do about our predicament. He only complains about it. He says that college is not as good an investment as it once was. He says we need an educated populace to have a ‘vibrant democracy.’ I think he is correct on those last two points, but he also seems to believe that college degree = necessary education for participation in democracy. Our K-12 systems need major reform, far more than our university system. Jamming yet more people into college is not the answer to educating citizens for a “vibrant democracy.” Teaching students how to read critically, write clearly, and understand the basic political structures of the US and their role in those structures should be done in K-12.</p>
<p>I’m struggling to understand this thread. America is facing challenges and we all have to deal with that. I don’t need Robert Reich to know that there is no law of nature preventing tuition increases from outpacing education ROI, if circumstances allow that to occur.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m just too used to sakky’s usual threads…tell me, what are you aiming at here?</p>
<p>I was talking about within the context of a school. Even if a pipe bursts within a school, the teachers and the principal will still be in charge of maintaining orderly conduct of the students.</p>
<p>And - and I hope you don’t take this as an insult, because I don’t mean it to be one - but I would guess that your high school is not considered to be one of the ‘top-ranked’ schools in the country (however flawed you may think those rankings are). You don’t have ambitious parents around the country moving to your district for the express purpose of having their children be eligible to enroll at your high school, right? You don’t have parents waiting breathlessly for word over whether their child was admitted to your school, akin to the annual ritual surrounding admissions to Phillips Exeter or Bronx Science, right? You don’t have administrators at the Department of Education and faculty at top-ranked university Ed Schools touting to your school as a ‘model’ that other schools around the country should hope to emulate, right? </p>
<p>And perhaps that’s the crux of the problem. We have an entire ‘educational establishment’ that sanctifies and promotes college-prep. Any high school that doesn’t place a substantial number of graduates into college is not going to be promoted as a ‘model’ high school that others should imitate. Indeed, the opposite is true - the establishment would view such a high school as a cautionary tale. </p>
<p>And if we are indeed going to convince more high school students to become laborers rather than be bound for college, then the educational establishment needs to change its preferences. Vocationally-ranked high schools should then be top-ranked. Professors of Education should publish laudatory research articles and white papers about the vocational schools. </p>
<p>But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen. </p>
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<p>First of all, that’s a misleading statistic. The reason that the majority of Americans do not have bachelor’s degrees is because very few of the older generation (i.e. over age 50) have bachelor’s degrees. </p>
<p>But secondly, it’s irrelevant. The question is not so much the educational attainment level of the parents, but rather the desired educational attainment level of the children. After all, parents generally want something better for their children than what they themselves had. In the eyes of many parents, that ‘something better’ is often times a college degree. As one man recently told me: “I performed backbreaking hard labor my whole life so that my children wouldn’t have to.”</p>
<p>The real question then is why do many parents think that college does represent ‘something better’, and it is hard to conclude that the media and marketing power of the educational establishment are not key causal factors. When you have countless movie and TV shows telling children to ‘Stay in School’, ‘Get Top Grades’, and ‘Go to College’, it’s not surprising that many kids will indeed do exactly that.</p>
<p>Yeah, the failed haberdasher…who also went to business school and then law school. </p>
<p>And besides, I think it would be more accurate to characterize him as a failed businessman, whose business just happened to be a haberdashery. It’s not as if he was merely a blue-collar worker. </p>
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<p>Nevertheless, we keep handing politicians a vast sweep of powers. The President of the United States has the power to start a war today. He has that power only because we chose to elect him. The President, along with the Senate and the House, have the power to redirect billions of dollars of spending. If they decide that they need to redirect nearly a trillion dollars of funding to rescue the finance industry, they’ll do it. If they decide that they want to entirely reform the health insurance system of the country, they’ll do that. </p>
<p>If we truly despised our politicians, then surely we would give them far less power over our lives. The only reason that they have that power is because we keep giving it to them.</p>