[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:51:46 +0100
Mike Meredith <very at zonky.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:13:52 -0400, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> > Public school education these days:
> > 
> > 3. A way to force people to accept, even expect, drudgery in their 
> > future jobs.
> 
> There's people who argue that public education has always been like
> that. Or worse.
> 
> One thing about the quality of teaching though ... if you pay peanuts
> then you'll get monkeys. I'm sure there are some brilliant teachers out
> there; after all I know some personally. However if you want the best,
> you have to pay for it and teaching has been for a long time a badly
> paid profession ... at least as far back as WWII in the UK (just
> finished re-reading Anthony Burgess's first part of his autobiography
> where he moans about poor pay for teachers).

There is some truth to the idea that you get what you paid for.  However,
teachers are usually paid significantly above average wages in most places
where I've looked it up, so I'm not sure that's really the problem.

If they aren't getting paid enough, then neither is anyone else.

Also, in many areas complaints about the funding of education has resulted in
big increases in pay, and school budgets.  At the same time, the quality of
the students has dropped significantly.

While this doesn't prove that paying more gets you less, it does at least
show that money isn't the fundamental problem.

Just a note: my 6th grade teacher retired at $49K/year in the late 80s or
early 90s. This was when a major or chief on the police force would only get
about $35K/year, and the local average retirement pay was under $22K/year.

Not that it proves anything, but I'd be real careful trying to draw
conclusions from pay scales.

BTW: my sixth grade teacher was a great guy.  He was the only one in the
entire 7 years of grade school that was worth a damn, so I don't begrudge him
getting a decent retirement.

The problem is all the crappy ones got it too.

> It is a little too easy to glorify the education systems of the past.

Most of the comparisons are noting what is missing now, not glorification.

Some of this is natural cycles, but in recent history we've also played far
too much with social engineering, and trying to teach the next generation by
showing them how to use what the last generation created, rather than how to
create it themselves.

Other than that, a lot of things have improved, and that's certainly a good
thing.

However, what good does all that knowledge do a graduate, when he is still
functionally innumerate and illiterate, and unable to create tools?

> We might get a very different picture by comparing the average
> vocabulary of all 18 year old students in 1950 and 2006. 

It would seem better to compare their ability to make use of the vocabulary
they have.

Quantitative analysis is popular, but useless in most cases.



-- 
shannon          | If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
                 |         -- Mark Twain