The first strand in explaining educational romanticism is a mythic image of the good old days when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three R’s. You have probably run across tokens of it in occasional editorials that quote examination questions once asked of public schools students. Here is an example that The Wall Street Journal gave from the admissions test to Jersey City High School in 1885: “Write a sentence containing a noun as an attribute, a verb in the perfect tense potential mood, and a proper adjective.” Or consider the McGuffey Readers that were standard textbooks in the nineteenth century, filled with literary selections far more difficult than the ones given to today’s students at equivalent ages. That’s the kind of material all children routinely learned, right?
Wrong. American schools have never been able to teach everyone how to read, write, and do arithmetic. The myth that they could has arisen because schools a hundred years ago did not have to educate the least able. When the twentieth century began, about a quarter of all adults had not reached fifth grade and half had not reached eighth grade. The relationship between school dropout and intellectual ability was not perfect, but it was strong. Today’s elementary and middle schools are dealing with 99 percent of all children in the eligible age groups. Let today’s schools not report the test results for the children that schools in 1900 did not have to teach, and NAEP scores would go through the roof.
It's time and past time to stop trying to put 100% of kids on the college track, bring back vocational ed.
I think this article makes profound sense.
I am no fan of public schools (I homeschool and always have, all my kids) but I don’t like it when they are blamed for inadequacy based on the fact that ALL the students aren’t graduates headed for college.
If we all get Bachelor’s degrees, who is going to pave the roads? Roof the houses? Plant the trees?
We need a balance in our society. We can only handle a small number of pointy headed intellectuals.
Many - perhaps even most - of the important jobs in our nations should not require a college degree.
We should all be literate, have a working knowledge of basic math, and know basic civics. The rest is specialization, which should be available to those so inclined.
In my utopia, there are no public schools. The government, because it has a legitimate interest in defense, provides a “free” literacy course, a “free” basic math course, and a “free” course in basic citizenship, for all ages, at the local library, offered at various times to suit kids and/or adults.
All other education is the parents’ or individuals’ responsibility.
Oh well, a girl can dream.