Community Colleges are not really speedboats, though, deployed appropriately, they could be one of the most powerful elements in an effective educational system. They are more like water wings. They can provide necessary but not sufficient support for the well motivated who have had to strike out on their own, educationally.

I've written elsewhere in the fray at great length about the nightmare that is mandatory k-12 education - a stimulus plan and rhetorical strategy deployed by a bankrupt president desperate to fix bad unemployment figures. FDR forced mandatory high school on teenage boys who didn't need it so that their jobs would go to heads of households, otherwise unemployed.

Then and now, mandatory and continuous education k-12 was not needed for many people. For a short while, the system was robust enough to absorb the flood of students and condition them for somewhat effective schooling. This broke down over time, though, as wave after wave of poorly prepared, unwilling, unengaged, simultaneously too mature and immature student resisted the infantilizing forces of mandatory 'education' - locked in a room with a nursemaid or jailor, depending, in many cases.

Meanwhile, students held lockstep year after year, shuffled around through interconnected institutions, became packs. Trends, fads and epidemics spread like wildfire through these populations. Generation gaps opened like chasms. Education pushed back independance and initiative into the late teens, pushed back marriage and childrearing, pushed back opportunity for useful service and remuneration. It made criminals of those who would rather be doing and earning.

Frankly, truck drivers can still do their job with a solid elementary school education in addition to on the job training. However, most people don't have a solid elementary school education. They don't need to get it because they will be trapped in school forever - another 6 years - and they can get it remedially then. There are few standards to get out of elementary school and none to get into middle/high school. It's mandatory, after all. Further, no matter what you do - short of a felony that lands you in juvenile hall - you can't really get kicked out of school. There is nowhere else to 'be.'

The same is true of the watered down high school education. Teachers can't focus on teaching and students can't focus on learning because so many students don't want to be there, the halls are dangerous and distracting.

This could all be solved. We just need to make elementary school strict - with graduation based on performance - and middle school, high school entrance dependant on entrance exams. We need to have an educated work force, of course. So we need to guarantee each person 12, or maybe even 16, years of free education. However, this shouldn't be contiguous. There should be schools that are limited by performance and by specialty and by age group - but these should be relatively broadly defined in the public system. High schools should be open to students from the teens into the 20s, for example. This will break up 'year groups.' The students will have to be focused and behaved and perform. If you get kicked out mid semester, you lose that whole semester from your allotment. So you need to go places you want to study.

If you want to leave school after elementary school, you will be required to enroll in a registered internship/apprenticeship, until you reach high school age - but you will be paid and trained. You can feel like you are contributing, and get a sense of how the working world is, if you want to aim for re-entering school soon. A year working might clear the mind and give a sense of purpose to one's studies. Nothing like 'real word problems' to teach math, eh?

The community colleges then can serve as the high schools for students in their 30s and beyond, as well as colleges and some kinds of graduate schools for students in their 40s and beyond. These schools will really offer a focused teaching, not a trough for the unmotivated who have to go to a college to make the state statistics look good, but aren't sure what college is really about.

Most people don't need to go to Harvard. Some of the people there don't even know what to do with it. Our educational system won't be fixed by marching everyone through those gates - or through any gates. It will only be fixed when people enter the schoolhouse doors under their own steam with a sense of purpose and a reason to study, and leave to support themselves and each other by being productive members of the community. 12 billion for MK, NCC, SCC, BHCC, etc won't come close to achieving that.

BenK,

I actually don't disagree with all of your points; I think the problems with discontinuous spurts of education and requirements to get into the next level of schooling might be insurmountable, but they are interesting ideas.

I would argue, however, that we all, regardless of our jobs, need more than an elementary school education. We need it to make informed decisions and to be productive citizens in our democracy.

I agree that typically the devil is in the details; you've pointed out that institutional interfaces might be a challenge to design rationally. I agree that it could be complex; but I think the core certifications (like a high school diploma) will still be valuable and comprehensible, and that we can shape the system around them to a degree.

I would argue that an informed citizenry does not necessarily need more than an elementary school education in terms of formal learning for the pursuit of general affairs, and in so much as they really should have a higher level of general learning, currently, they don't even have the functional elementary education.

I wouldn't imagine a system in which most people stop at elementary school with their 'learning.' I would presume that people attend to political affairs, read the paper, do on the job training, etc. Degrees of 'productivity' economically isn't necessarily my metric for a successful person, but to be a good citizen one should be informed and able to judge wisely. For this, a grasp of statistics, economics, political philosophy, etc... well, you see that these aren't really part of most people's high school or even college education. In short, requiring more years of school isn't getting us close to the target - so we shouldn't just keep piling that on. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different result.

Your proposal has merit, as well as some similarity to the European system, where you're sent to a trade school if you don't have the stuff for higher edication. Still, I'm not sure that I'd want these elementary school level workers voting. How could they possibly make informed decisions? This plan, as written, would create legions of citizens equipped to do nothing but their job. They would be easy prey for propaganda, ripe targets for religious zealotry of every stripe, and would compound the already bad situation of people voting in their personal self interest without regard for the needs of society, or, dare I say, civilization. Not that we don't already have some of these issues now, but I think you'd make it far worse. Then again, maybe most people would get out into a trade or log a few years in uniform and reevaluate how educated they want to be. I guess it could go either way.

Granted, my own degree is in political science, and I tend to overestimate how much the average joe knows (or should know) about that. If there were alternate venues for political and social engagement, mandatory service of some form and a healthy "town hall meeting" culture for discussion, then I guess most of my fears could be put to rest. If we tried it with current levels of apathy, however, I fear it might be a train wreck.

:-)

So, what are you saying? That we should have a bunch of 12-year-old apprentice truck drivers? How is a kid just out of sixth grade supposed to enroll in an apprentice truck driver program when he's not even old enough to test for a regular driver's license, much less a CDL?

One of the problems we have is that our blue collar factory workers are severely undereducated compared to workers in Japan or even Canada. I read an article in the paper a few years ago in which a Japanese automaker was considering building a new factory either in Louisiana or Canada. After a survey found that the illiterary rate among the worker pool in Louisiana was much higher than in Canada, they chose to build the factory in Canada.

I think your proposal would make that problem worse, not better.

Yeah, they SAY it's important to have an educated workforce. But they still primarily build in the South--Mississippi and Alabama aren't exactly educational hotbeds, yet they get Toyota and Mercedes plants. Right-to-work trumps ability-to-read.

Canada's advantage over a Northern US state is universal single payer health care.

BenK,

What do you think, and I'm not being flippant or snide or anything, an appropriate level of knowledge is? You say things like, "...currently, they don't even have the functional elementary education." What do you think a functional elementary education would be?

VEH:

Yeah, they SAY it's important to have an educated workforce. But they still primarily build in the South--Mississippi and Alabama aren't exactly educational hotbeds, yet they get Toyota and Mercedes plants. Right-to-work trumps ability-to-read.

Canada's advantage over a Northern US state is universal single payer health care.

Good point, but in this case (and I wish I could remember which paper I read it in so that I could find a link), the two candidates were Canada and a southern US state. So, I guess a higher literacy rate and not having to pay for employee health benefits trumps right-to-work laws.

That should be something to think about.

I think that mandatory education serves a very important purpose up to a point. Having said that, I have made the following argument for years:

The typical response to poor education outcomes has been to make school easier. The correct (and liberal) attitude should be to make school harder. They should make high school hard enough that (1) having a high school diploma means something and (2) not having a high school deploma is not an economic death sentense. Then, undergraduate education should be hard enough that a college degree is a mark of high distinction and a graduate degree a rare and impressive thing.

This has a number of benefits. The first is that we don't waste resources keeping people in classrooms longer than is necessary. The second is that instead of being in school, people can be making a productive contribution to society. The third is that, by reducing the time and money needed to get an education, the field will be more level for the poor, those that can least afford to trade 4 years for a piece of paper and 50k in debts.

Instead, we decide that everyone should graduate from high school, making a high school diploma meaningless; and that everyone should go to college, replacing the middle class ethos of self-investment with the old money ideal of personal experience. It is a horrible system that has been set up; an illiberal failure in the guise of liberalism.

Instead, we decide that everyone should graduate from high school, making a high school diploma meaningless; and that everyone should go to college, replacing the middle class ethos of self-investment with the old money ideal of personal experience. It is a horrible system that has been set up; an illiberal failure in the guise of liberalism.

Well, I think having everyone graduate form high school is a very important goal. But you're right in that our mistake as a society has been to make too easy to get a diploma rather than requiring everyone to, for example, be able to read at an adult level before they can leave high school.

College is not for everyone. Community colleges, unfortunately, suffer from an image of being a remedial high school rather than an affordable place to either obtain a vocational certificate or serve as a bridge to finishing a four year degree.

I agree with you that everybody does not need to go to Havard, BenK but I do not think that your system has certain flaws that need to be worked out.

The main flaw is that to have a proper multi-track system like the one you are proposing, you need to have a relatively high number of kids living in relatively small area. The school systems closest to your proposals are the ones in the old cities of the United States like New York, Boston, and San Francisco, where there are enough students in a small enough area to make it easy for the kid to get to a school outside his neighborhood. The typical suburban-rural infrastructure in the United States coupled with poor public transportation will make it hard to send different kids in the same neighborhood to different schools. I suppose the different schools could all be located in one central campus like a university though.

The other flaw is that in democracies and republics, schools are supposed to do more than prepare kids for work. They are also supposed to prepare good citizens that could exercise their vote with intelligence. This requires more than an elementary school education.

Well, I'd love to create a country full of passionate, well-informed, eagerly volunteering citizens.

However, I have some bones to pick with your perception of our citizens. Many of the most generous are the least well off. Many of the most involved in local affairs are the least educated but very well informed, at least at a local level. There are all sorts of complications with a statement like this, but in general, it isn't the rich and ivy league educated who enter the military.

I certainly think that some work experience will not discourage education. I think that education completely divorced from experience, on the other hand, becomes a virtual chore. Students do their best to avoid learning because they don't know what it is 'for' and can't see the problems it solves for them.

I don't think it would create those legions you describe. Instead, I think it would create hordes of citizens who decided to read some literature because that class came along with their accounting class, and find that it addresses questions that were welling up as they experienced office politics and family life; questions which weren't on their adolescent minds.

I think a functional elementary education gets one through the three R's to a fairly reasonable level: basic geometry, as well as fractions, decimals, exponents, and some basic equations. Reading the newspaper and some books; writing short documents and doing some library research. Probably a functional conversational command of the basics of a second language ("Hi, how are you? The bathroom is down the hall. Come with me to eat a sandwich!"). A brief introduction to money and the law (civics at the application level). Exposure to music and the graphic arts; some science (basic concepts in biology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, classical physics) and a basic outline of ancient/classic, world and American history.

This is achievable within 6 years of education; perhaps for some people it will take 7 or 8. It would certainly take assistance for those with dyslexia or a learning disorder. It would also take some quite decent elementary school teachers.

I'm not advocating a "let'em loose" strategy. I'm arguing that they need an apprenticeship program. Reading should never be sacrificed. Hands on skills, however, or programming skills (for many things, a very practical level of skill - computer controlled machining, etc), could be an important stepping stone into a very effective blue collar or even creative labor force.

We agree on this. The way to achieve 100% high school education is not to make high school meaningless and mandatory. I believe the best way is to make it challenging and meaningful, allow people to put it off until they are properly motivated and matured, make it safe and secure and a place people can do their work (students AND teachers), and not put people who aren't ready for it into a cultural and economic death spiral or send them to a 'so-called' college where they can essentially recapitulate high school.