What would happen if education were useful?

What would happen if education were useful?

How much of what we spend huge chunks of our lifetime and great amounts of money on is actually useful?   Of course I am speaking about formal education.   Public education costs take the lion’s share of local and state budgets.   The hours spent in school consume the bulk of our childhood.   What are we doing this for?

I am reminded of Frost’s poem about two roads diverged and he took the one less traveled by.  It is time to assess the road most travelled by and what are we gaining along that road.

The Kirwan Commission in Maryland has recommended dramatic increases in funding for education.  Much of the money is for increases in teacher salaries and the addition of pre-k and expansion of kindergarten.  For the last decade, we have become obsessed with increasing standards as measured by high stakes testing.  To my knowledge no one is evaluating the usefulness of the accumulation of all that knowledge.  And that is assuming that the students really store that knowledge once the testing is done.

Initially, public education was established so that the United States would have an educated electorate as we moved toward full suffrage for all citizens.   What is the point of education at public expense today?   We keep asking citizens to spend more and more money but we don’t seem to be evaluating the content of that expensive education.  Some of the most failing local school systems in Maryland spend the most money per pupil.  As I have said frequently, paying a bad teacher more money does not make that person a better teacher.  Although it does make the person a better paid bad teacher.

We are now requiring that all kids take algebra II in order to receive a high school diploma.  No one seems to need to explain why that is, except it increases standards- standards for what!?

Our kids need to be taught basic economics.  The last great recession made it clear that most citizens don’t recognize that a mortgage offer or a loan offer that seems too good to be true, probably is.   Our national credit card debt is on the rise again.   Do people know what they are paying for things when they add in the credit charges?   Do students know how much it really costs to live?   Adolescents dream of fancy cars and big houses but have not a clue about apartment rent or taxes.

Last year the Speaker of the House of Delegates in Maryland died.   He was the longest serving Speaker of the House.  There was lots of coverage in the local media.  A few weeks ago I asked students in a graduate level courses about the event. Not A Single Person in the Class knew what I was talking about!  These people are all college graduates working on an advanced degree.  We teach kids about algebra II, about settling of the colonies ad nauseum, and about physics.   Yet most graduates can’t write a grammatically correct sentence, understand enough civics to knowledgeably vote nor figure out their own financial situation.

Not sure we are getting our money’s worth for public education.  What would happen if education really were useful!