[MD] 42

[John Carl]

Hi Arlo,

Hope you don't mind a more leisurely pace of response.  I swear being
unemployed keeps a guy busier than any job.


[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:

I don't doubt there would be many failures in such a system but conversely
there would be successes as well and that kind of open framework would
produce more quality in the long run.  Some sort of accreditation body
would still be in effect so the most egregious errors you mention would be
avoided.

Perhaps I'm more of an enthusiast because for a while, we had this in
California and it sure worked for my family.  We had a budget of $1400 per
kid per semester to spend as we saw fit.  We bought a lot of cool stuff
that we couldn't have afforded otherwise, for the family and my kids got a
huge jump on the internet revolution with digital cameras and imacs and
programs.  But obviously such a program is open to abuse and sure enough,
Ready Springs charter school got shut down by the state and the whole
charter school system was throttled down but there are still remnants of it
that work great.  The Ghidotti charter for instance, allows high school
kids to attend jr college and get college credits while earning their high
school degree and a lot of our friends took advantage of that and liked it
a lot.  All in all, open and free competition between schools for the
student body can only be a good thing in the end.




> [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.
>
>
John:

I kind of like the English school system.  If you're smart enough and study
hard you go into the Uni but if you lack college status you get a
vocational training of some kind.  Society doesn't just dump you, it tries
to provide everybody with some kind of living.

 Arlo:

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:  That sounds good.  I'd like to see pure football colleges too.
College football has become ridiculous.




>
> [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).
>

Ok.  No hurry.  :)

Meanwhile, this was kind of interesting:

"Many times, that kid who’s being choked to death by “formal education”
will eventually get suckered into going to college. He’ll go, not because
he needs to be there, nor because it’s the best thing for him, but just
because. Because because, and that’s all.

So he’ll amass a gigantic debt, miss out on four or five years that could
be spent honing his specific skillset, and end up exactly where he could
have been, and would have been, without college. Only now he’s 28 thousand
dollars in the hole and half a decade behind the curve.

Something has to change. Listen to me on this one. Something HAS to change.
This can’t continue. It is not a sustainable model. There are millions of
kids with no assets, no plans, and no purpose, taking out enormous loans to
purchase a piece of paper they’ll likely never use. It can’t go on this
way."

http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/01/19/thank-god-i-wasnt-college-material/

John