[MD] 42

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[John]
When I say "more adaptive" I'm thinking "more diversity". I think educational diversity makes it worthwhile to drop [teachers unions]. ... Part of the problem with a monolithic "one size fits all" system is that you have to figure out the common denominator and teach THAT. 

[Arlo]
You say "more diversity", but I fear that vouchers would splinter the educational landscape into a million homogenous splinters, where students would be exposed to less overall diversity in thought. There would be creationist schools, hollow-earth schools, flat-earth schools, each with their own narrow and socially-driven curriculum. Teachers who deviate from this would have no recourse to being fired. Needless to say, I share you overall criticism (more diversity in the curriculum) but disagree over exactly what that means, and how to create this. 

[John]
It became unfashionable to teach home ec and auto shop as part of the high school curriculum and so they were eliminated everywhere.  In a voucher system it would make economic sense to start up these kinds of specialty schools and even the poor would be able to afford them.

[Arlo]
Somewhere in all this historical discussion, the role of the parents seems missing. Home economics was dropped in the transition of schools from pursuing a Deweyian-like civil-social agenda to a post-industrial capital-driven STEM agenda. As tax dollars were cut, less "economically" viable subjects were the first to go. Arts, music, humanities, always the first in line to be cut. Crawford discusses, in great detail and with great perception, the historical path to vocational education cuts, but its worth noting that the same cultural shifts left shop classes behind as well. 

One idea of note, would be to refashion the public schools into an academy-like "college" system, where you'd have some core curricular requirements but students would be left to roam among 'colleges' focusing on areas of interest (and each college would have the autonomy to decide how to best meet its objectives; apprenticeship models maybe in business education, performance objectives in, say, theatre). In this way, you'd fund one music college, of which all students in your area would make use of, rather than funding hundreds of individual schools each with their own agenda. Through it all, though, I think teachers absolutely deserve protection from social-market forces. 

[John]
Well that again is another discussion but I don't think the main effect of the  mediascape is fracturing, I think it's uniting. 

[Arlo]
I'll try to come back to this later today in a separate thread (since its a topic shift).