Posted on 09/06/2006 5:31:10 AM PDT by T-Bird45
If you're looking for the action in education, forget the Ivy League. Talk instead to Anthony Zeiss, president of Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. It has six campuses and 70,000 students taking classes in everything from remedial English to computer networking. With about 12 million students, the nation's 1,200 community colleges help answer this riddle: Why do Americans do so badly on international educational comparisons and yet support an advanced economy?
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Thats true. I'm sick of hearing the U.S. and our education system compared with that of other countries. Its apples and oranges.
I also find it hard to believe when so many from all over the world come HERE to be educated!
Education ping
I've always believed that the reason we support an advanced economy is because the American Learning System (at the college level, anyway) operates in a fundamentally different fashion than any other educational system. In Europe, you get your degree once you've memorized sufficient facts and can regurgitate them on a test. In the US, you are not taught to simply know long lists of facts; you are taught how to figure things out. This is why an American businessman stacks up well against a European one. The European businessman could probably recite to you every economic theory ever created and make a large, air tight, sure to succeed business plan that takes into account all contigencies. Then some upstart American comes along and invents a new contigency altogether that his European competitor can't deal with.
LOL
The honeymoon is over but few notice.
I was just sure this was an early DUFU...
The problem in Europe is that there is little incentive for entrepreneurship and little movement of individuals within the economic strata. This has much more to do with hidebound bureaucracy and elitism than a failure to teach critical thinking at the University level in Europe.
The problem is the attitude of entitlement among many of the University graduates who come from wealthy backgrounds. Since there is little reward for the individual to work harder or smarter than his peers, it does not translate into the type of inventiveness found among college graduates and non-graduates in the US. That said, there is plenty of innovation within European companies; even Airbus with all it's current troubles can be held as an example.
But the freedom found within the American economy is why you find the most industrious European graduates working throughout the US.
As a professor at a technical university I agree that they type of educaton we are providing is vital to our economy. We will simply not get the graduates with the technical training needed to make things work from traditional liberal arts colleges or even state universities.
American Industry spends 100's of millions educating it's employees every year. The publioc education system is out of touch with what American business and industry expects of people. Our company gave 5000 seats of advanced 3d design software to the florida public school system last year. We also offer training class to teachers for free.
We had about 30 teachers around the state take advantage of this so far. When I conduct the classes, I find the teachers are about on par with 1970's procedures. And they really resist learning new concepts. Their students are typically more computer savvy than they are. It's a shame.
If you look at the history of invention, the inventors were primarily tinkerers and hands-on self-taught type people who didn't need a classroom to give them the ability to discover new technology.
In fact, most dropped out of school.
Dead wrong. Phone? Alexander Bell graduated from the University of London. Transistor? Invented by a guy (with Ph. D. degree from Yale) at Bell Labs named Lee de Forest. Polio vaccine? Jonas Salk, M.D. Tinkering is done. Now and forever. The inventions which could be done by someone without a formal education were over a hundred plus years ago.
You mean the vacuum-tube triode was invented by Yale graduate Lee DeForest, but he didn't work at Bell Labs. Schockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were the transistor guys at Bell Labs.
Little, if any, of this subject matter will be found in a standardized test. However, this material is the backbone of the internet and has led the revolution to the information economy and driven efficiencies in the economy that are the envy of the world.
If one were to eliminate Cisco products overnight, the US and WORLD economies would cease to operate. Nothing we now know and count on economically would work...the banks would be shut down. The routing of freight would be shut down. Airlines would be shut down. Oil companies would be shut down...even the grocery stores.
Even the harvesting of trees to make toilet paper would come full stop.
Edison. Gates. Jobs. Marconi. Ford. Westinghouse. Otto.
Tinkering is not done, and it never will be as long as humans retain some degree of freedom.
In other words, we are educated to be the best debtors on the planet.
BUMP
Liberty is tricky business. If you believe in liberty, you have to expect a fairly large minority of people to take unfair advantage of the system and waste their youths in the endless party or with the girl du jour. When reality smacks those libertines in the head, then they get serious - and the same system allows them unlimited possibilities. Samuelson sure has made me think with this one.
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