National Standards for US Schools

Well, I'm scheduled as one of the judges at the Mass State Science Fair again next month at MIT and I can tell you there are some very bright science and engineering students competing at this event.

Come up and visit on Friday April 30 or sign up to judge. You will enjoy!

Is a standard nation wide such a bad thing? School curriculum standards change from state to state. In some states county to county. Many parents that have moved to obtain a better job have found that their children are burden with a curriculum more advanced then the last school they attended. That compounds the issues of a new environment, with no friends for the children. Some have hard time recovering from it some may not even make it. Become candidate for your technical schools. The parent now being distracted from their new job to see that their children get the help needed to get caught up.

"Please don't derail this thread with politics."

Sorry TVP45 but politics is part of the issue. It's a fact that people with higher incomes generally have better schools in their area with higher standards of curriculum in their schools. The politicians elected to those areas do everything they can to see more tax money is spent on those schools to be able do that.

"It appears to have ABSOLUTELY NO shop, cooking, agricultural, retail training, or electronics courses. What are they thinking?"

My dear friend TVP45. Presuming you are in US, What are YOU thinking? Our young people today buy games, they don't make things, why waste their time with shop? Who needs to be taught cooking when microwave is essentially idiot proof and most folks eat out anyway?

Agricultural? You mean like how to live on a farm and shovel poop?

Retail training? My wife is working retail. With the stupid management policies they have, I am thankful that they don't teach critical thinking in most schools, Those people would go crazy in retail, as my wife is currently suffering through.

Electronics courses? Again, As long as the debit card works, we can buy all the electronics stuff we need from our friends who actually make things in taiwan, south korea, and places like that.

Wipe off that froth, you are getting worked up over stuff that don't matter!!!

milo"Sarcasm font front and center"

You must be joking, no? Cooking is everything except microwave. It is providing for the essentials in life, the bricks to build, the fuel to make your life harmonic, so that everything works well. And cooking is the art to present it in a way you don't get bored by eating, but seduced to eat with a smile. Wait till the money is gone for replacing stuff that can be fixed with a 3 cents resistor or a 6 cents transistor. To name some. Isn't that the reason for your wife to work that terrible work?

Face it.

I was also raised by the system described.My mother drew 95 bucks to raise three of us.Louisiana,I was born 1946.There were 10 of us in the household.

Face it.This problem will ALWAYS be with us.America is not what it was nor will it ever be again.Schooling is going to have to come from some other source.The really intelligent will find a way.The Internet will help.

Thank God,universities are putting courses online FREE,,yes FREE for the learning.Wow.Think of that.This is a very very, GOOD thing,to paraphrase Martha Stewart.

I fully expect things to continue going downhill such as simple Ethics,Honesty, and for the thought of getting RICH at any price,outside of prison,will dominate most young adults.At the same time as our aversion to manual labor increases.There will be some exceptions of course.I am one of them,,I escaped by being different,interested in goofy,of NO use,things,such as Science.

Don't take my text out of context.A lot of you reading this post will NOT understand the sentence before this.A lot of you will understand it.This in itself speaks volumes.OP,,(Original Poster),,I feel your pain and sadness,,but look at it this way (as I do),,we,America, have a new leader,younger,and very popular,,Let's ALL OF US,,try to help him any way we can,, and as long as we can.Our Fore Fathers would have wanted it this way.Democracy in it's fullest.

Cheer up!

Joe in Texas

I think I think our forefathers were cautious of a full democracy and so created a republic instead or rather a synergy of the two; the United States is a mixture of the two systems of government (Republican under Common Law, and democratic under statutory law)

You say, "Our Fore Fathers would have wanted it this way.Democracy in it's fullest "

Our Founding Fathers loathed the idea of a democracy as they viewed it as mob rule. Which is why the US is not a democracy, but a republic where we are governed by the rule of law, not by how 51% of the populace thinks we should be governed.

However, unfortunately, things certainly shifted more toward democracy over the past few hundred years.

I want to thank you for your rant. It brought great discussion today at the bar. I am 25 years old, so I dont know anything to those with more exsperience. But I am an indivudial who started at the bottem and worked my way through the work force, construction, electrician apprentice, lisenced. Went to community college and now finishing university Electrical Eng. I can see that people are getting stupid and more stupid every year.

I series has been on for 2 series. Jericho. Which takes the US and sends them back to anarchy and choas via 20 atomic blasts throughout the country. Everyone is on their own, no law, no visa and no 1-800 number to call. It shows that people are 9 meals away from complete anarchy. And could never live without comfort.

People must realize that formal education is something creates to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. When it comes down to it, 90% of university grads can give you a business evaluation or a paper of post Civil War america but would not be able to change their own oil if needed or be able to depend on themselves and not home depot and walmart for survival.

Society has created this person, well at least inn Canada who are so insecure with themselves that they need to be babysat by society and are willing to pay for this.

Actually under California educational standard some of the university course work you are required to take as elective must be in something like industrial technology on subjects like automotive repairs. So the university grads will actualluy know more about how to change their own oil and such than most high school grads, since shop is not a requisite for graduation from high school. It is so hard to just get students at a high school level to learn how to read and write in our common language at a sufficient level, and to solve rudimentary mathematics, to be able to work for McDonalds. The issue of no chiold left behind meant we spend a huge amount of our resources trying to teach the weakest links to be able to work for Walmart that we fail to provide sufficient education in our schools for many of the brightest. These bright children then need other resources to provide learning opportunities. Parents wealth, education and influence can provide the other resources (skill, time and money) beyond school, and this correlates to children of wealthier families advancing beyond the level of the teachers capacity to educate. Which then leads to the question of why teaching is a separate educational path in universities, rather than requiring teachers to be educated up to the same level as the practicioners or future higher education candidates in a field of study. Why is a BA in chemistry for a potential high school teacher so rudimentary in comparison to that of a ACS program BS chemistry program. The system we have developed is severely flawed, we use the weakest intellectual links to graduate universities to teach our high school students, and then wonder why the high school students aren't brighter. Where as, many private schools require, instead of a teacher certification and degrees in teaching, masters degrees in the field to be taught and some resume showing prior practicing experience in the field. Thus a chemistry teacher in a private high school will frequently have been an actual chemist previously. I wonder why do private educated children perorm better than public educated?

Rather than teaching being a means of conveying special knowledge and information to another generation as it develops. It has in public schools, teaching itself has evolved into a concpet of the knowledg and information that the specialists should be trained in, even though it is not what they need to convey.

I wonder why do private educated children perorm better than public educated?

It may also have something to do with the fact that a lot of private school is for the financial elite, and it is MUCH easier to expel a private school student than a public school student.

I have seen serious violence be perpetrated and threats of death against teachers result in little to NO punishment. One student set off fireworks in the cafeteria sending parts of the school into a terror as they thought it was a gunman.

He was suspended for the rest of the year. At private school? See ya! You are done, here. It is time to care about the kids that care about their future. You don't need a high school education to work at McDonald's or Wal-Mart. So make a high school diploma mean something again and stop strangling education trying to find ways to motivate kids who don't care anyway. Education is a privilege. It is not a right.

Education is a priviledge, but it does benefit all of society having the opportunity to draw from all available minds to try and achieve a higher overall advancement. The issue really isn't about throwing kids out of schools, but rather they need to be motivated to learn. This comes from a variety of media, having qualified experienced professionals teaching rather than making teaching in and of itself the profession. Forcing parents to become more involved through some combination of positive and negative reinforcement, punishment even. Enforcing greater punishment for criminal activities to those symbols who find wealth in our society through accidental or incidental means not associated with talent or educational skills, e.g. unskilled rappers or athletes whose greatest claim to fame is some illegal activities, violent outburst or primadonna behaviors should be prosecuted to the greatest degree of the law. Re-establishing some government regulation of the television media to constrain some of the perceptions about behaviors might be in order, there used to be much greater restrictions on the television media.

By and large the greatest influence on children still is their teachers and their parents. If teachers are not knowledgeable in a real world sense of the fields they teach and how they can benefit the children, how can they really convey the usefulness to the children. Also, if the teachers conceive of their jobs as the easy way to get through college and get to a secure pay check by baby sitting, versus really conveying knowledge about how the industry works, what are real expectations in the field, how to properly conduct oneself in the field, and what is and isn't really important. Most teachers have less math skills than the average business major graduating from college. So how can they explain the importance of math when they themselves barely understand it. Part of getting children involved relates to the children understanding that it is something they will need to know, and having a strong interest and understanding of the intricacies of the subject material. The other side is the parental involvement. Parents need to be both an inspiration/motivator for the children, and the hammer that aids the teachers in enforcing requirements when the child is not in school or in some cases is in school.

I attended both a private catholic school and public schools. The private schools still require the students to commit substantial violations and multiple times before the expel them. The private schools want the fees from the students parents, and frequently the teachers are more motivated to educate students. Also, not surprisingly, a professional adult can hold an actual conversation with a private school teacher, because they tend to be very well educated and experienced. Private schools have the option of hiring and firing professionals to teach subject material. Public schools hire non-professional college graduates with no particular advanced educational skills (at least relative to the graduating technical professionals) who rapidly become part of the bureaucracy and union. Private schools make real attempts to force parental involvement, public schools go through the motions to get bodies in the chairs so they can get their per head payments from the State. Not surprisingly, because of this type of bureaucratic unionized lowest quality we can get away with method, many school districts, in California at least, are being taken over by the State for excessively poor performance, and teacher are going to be laid off and replaced, hopefully with better qualified people. Teaching is one of the few jobs where there is actually extremely limited mitigation protocols for failure to meet quality control standards, and thus no real quality control. Elsewhere market and public pressures at least drive some quality control.

RCE,

I vehemently disagree with many of your gross generalizations of the qualification of public school teachers. Lines such as, "Most teachers have less math skills than the average business major graduating from college" suggest that you have either read research that would sustain this assumption or have surveyed the math abilities of business majors and a majority of teachers to be able to make such a statement. Granted, when talking education in a forum such as this, any one person can only speak based on experience unless they have actually conducted/read research. So I understand that as a lot of what I say here is from anecdotal experience, but also anecdotal experience that comes from ten years of service in the field, extensive training and internship work, a masters degree from a reputable school, and over 1700 students who have come through my door.

When you stated, "Public schools hire non-professional college graduates with no particular advanced educational skills", I can only assume you mean outside of New York, as for this state, not only are you required to have a certain number of weeks of student or intern teaching, you have to have an advanced degree in education within three years of holding your first position, and a minimum of 175 hours of professional development every five years. Failure to complete either will result in the revocation of your teaching license. Furthermore, you must pass a battery of exams that include both knowledge of a broad range of information in both your content area as well as a diverse understanding of pedagogical theory.

There are some areas that I do agree. Just tossing students to the wolves is not going to help society as a whole. But this notion that it relies on others to motivate students to better themselves has gone too far. It has forced some educators to consider the role of educator AND entertainer because if a student becomes bored, that teacher can be said not to be educating them. Learning is hard work. It is not all fun and games. I also agree that parents need to step up and teach their children how to behave and what a work ethic is so teachers can do their job: teaching. Too many of my colleagues over the years have spent time raising children instead of educating them. And that a poorly behaved student can result in hours of extra paperwork and meetings is ludicrous. It comes at the price of being able to educate those who actually want to learn.

If you have a means of getting/keeping parents engaged and take responsibility for their students, I am all ears. And while I don't see how we can change the values of the media so students care more about math than The Jersey Shore or whatever sad excuse for television is popular now, I would agree that it is the main culprit. There is little value in education because it means work and you can just lie, cheat, and steal you way to quick wealth with less effort.

There was a time when having skills and knowledge was so appreciated and valued that motivation was intrinsic. Until that type of intrinsic motivation is reborn en masse, this country will continue to slide down hill.

Actually, I is relatively easy to see what the graduating and credentialling requirements for a teaching major (actually in the majority of colleges they are called liberal studies majors) are. You can look online at your local State universities. I know in California there is an exemption for liberal studies teaching majors from passing the standard minimum math requirement for State approved universities general educational curriculum. Business majors are almost always required to take and pass calculus, teaching majors are not. Thus the vast majority of teaching majors do not bother to take an extra year worth of math as they are not required.

As far as the other background information, again someof it is left to be ambiguity. 175 hours of professional development implies to technical professionals (as defined by the US government) that you are taking 175 hours of advanced technical or arts training, since we are all educated in the definition of prrofessional used by the government for pay classication (must know exempt versus non-exempt stauts and what qualifies). However, I suspect that much of that 175 hours of training is on the concepts of teaching (how to get children involved, how to communicate with children, how to identify and handle problem children, how to reach children, how to use yarn in class, etc.) and not any technical training in the knowledge you are supposedly trying to convey. The unions and bureaucracy have developed a system in the public school system that is much more devoted to retaining persons who fit into the bureaucracy and the union, and focuses too much efforts on how to convey information rather than spending any efforts on making sure they persons conveying the information are actually knowledgable in this information they are trying to convey.

There is a vast difference between someone with a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in a technical subject, who then worked in the industry from some period and has real world experience, and someone with a bachelor of arts and master of arts in teaching who went right into teaching (to meet their mandatory class room time) as part of the credits for their master of arts degree. the thing is even children can at a relatively young age identify the guy who really knows what he is talking about , all the ins and outs, and the guy who read it somewhere in the text book the night before or week before the lecture. This goes to the skills and knowledge you discuss, public schools should not be allowed to be unionized as this does a diservice to those children. Teachers need to be retained not on their ability to pass a overly simplified credentialling program, but rather competitively like professional service providers are retained. Hire the best qualified in the field you want taught, and the children will listen.

As far as parents go, maybe if their was a performance based financial incentive, they might be more interested. however, parents seem to get very vocal about educational standards when they feel they are too restrictive agaisnt their own interests, or don't create the public appearance of advancement in their children. Something that seems to work fairly well in older societies was the application of shaming people. Public knowledge of student performance, level of skills, and who the guardians are would likely get a response. However, I would suspect the school board would try to find a means to manipulate this in favor of the most influential and outspoken parents.

I can't speak to California. I can only speak of what it is like in New York. There are not exemptions from math here, and all teachers must pass something known as the Liberal Arts and Science test to show basic competency in all subject areas. As for basic math requirements, even though I am an English teacher, I took Calc in both high school and college, as did most of my classmates (at least at the college level). There was one math that was below Calc that was dubbed "Math for Morons" that obviously frowned upon by even the student body.

If your claim is that people who teach in the humanities (which is what I assuming you mean by liberal arts) aren't having basic competency in math and that your definition of basic competency is Calculus, I would assume that you would agree that more people than not are not competent in math. And while I passed Calc in college, it has zero application to my current employment and life, and after 13 years of never using it, I doubt I could do much Calc. Any math involved for my profession, including writing spreadsheet algorithms for statewide testing results, I can do without a problem. Beyond that, there is not a single math, biology, chemistry, physics, or earth science teacher in my building who has not taken Calc. And believe me that I will ask today at our department meeting who took Calc in the English Department.

You state that, "I suspect that much of that 175 hours of training is on the concepts of teaching (how to get children involved, how to communicate with children, how to identify and handle problem children, how to reach children, how to use yarn in class, etc.) and not any technical training in the knowledge you are supposedly trying to convey." During the course of the school year, every teacher is evaluated over a broad spectrum of areas that DO include increase of content area knowledge. And while you point to your examples of non-technical training, pedagogy is the science AND art of the teacher. While I scoff at your attempt at humor ("how to use yarn in class"), allow me explain part of what my professional development hours for this afternoon will include: training for the newly revised NYS exam in English and then working with my scholastic team to best determine a means of implementing new pieces of literature and writing techniques to provide students with the opportunity to develop the skills they need to pass the exam WHILE not making it a central part of the courses I teach. We aim to make students proficient in skills so they can pass any test, either in school or in life.

Furthermore, you state that teachers "overly simplified credentialling program". Perhaps it would surprise you to know that while I was completing my master degree, two Ph.D's dropped out/failed out of the program. One was a chemical engineer and the other was a nuclear engineer. Both had 25 years of service time "in the field" and couldn't handle the work load of "an overly simplified credentialling program" and found that students had a hard time relating to them. I know this because I worked extra with the gentleman with a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering attempting to get his basic writing skills to an acceptable level and help him find common ground that he could use to relate to his students.

At the end of the program I completed, 80% of the people who dropped out were those who had spent extensive time in the field, and all but one was pursuing teaching in math or science (the other was a prospective social studies teacher).

If teaching is so dumbed down and full of inept academics who get fat on short hours, unheard of benefits, and substantial pay in a system that protects them even if they do nothing, might I suggest that those in the technical/corporate world who think they could do a better job at it to quit their jobs, get their license, and come join me in the trenches.

I love my job and I am damn good at doing it, so I won't apologize for feeling like your response calls both myself and those who I see work hard every day inexperienced simpletons who are not proficient in the basic knowledge that is mastered by those in the corporate world. Please note that I work for an engineering company in the summer and while I am sure that it is different than many other corporations, I have at least had a foot in both worlds.

Finally, while I don't know how to motivate parents to be better parents, I think that is at least an area that we can both agree is necessary.

If teaching is so dumbed down and full of inept academics who get fat on short hours, unheard of benefits, and substantial pay in a system that protects them even if they do nothing, might I suggest that those in the technical/corporate world who think they could do a better job at it to quit their jobs, get their license, and come join me in the trenches.

Few of those bashing teachers have ever tried it - their attacks are always global and hyperbolic, whereas the answers from teachers and those defending them are specific and real. Mocking teachers is so fashionable and always will be. Teaching ain't rocket science... it's something distinctly different.

I have tried it, though my experience is a tech-school diluted version of teaching and an ongoing gym class (but that's a different species). I think I'm an "okay" teacher - a better coach than a teacher, but no way am I going to subject myself to unruly students, long off-the-clock hours and pathetic pay.

I consider those bashing teachers - until they show some cred - to be the rough equivalent of a schizophrenic on the street complaining about the last device driver I wrote.

Actually, how to use yarn in class is something we observed one day when a group of us came into one of my graduate engineering course early to a teaching credentials course in mathematics to sit in the back. The teacher was literally spending classes time time setting up a demonstration with yarn on the board to show how you can present the concept of circumference as a measurable length to children, and how the circumference was a fixed ratio of the diameter. As far as calculus goes, if you are a specialized science teacher, you should have gone way beyond calculus. Majors in most physical sciences should have at least two more years of math after they complete the 3 semesters (or 4 quarters) of calculus (physic majors would typically be way beyond that as some of the physic courses have to teach the math required, since math majors don't even learn that type of math). However, for the vast majority of teachers out there they are not specialized to science and do not have to have a math level above that which most college bound high school graduates use. I am a engineer and don't know any engineers that use any substantial amount of calculus, but it provides a basis to a better understanding of math and how to apply it. As far as the higher math i had to take like PDEs, Linear algebra, Fourier Analysis, Vector Analysis, etc.. it is very likely i will never directly apply those levels of math again, but it helps me understand the nature of mathematical solutions. I have taught adults, who think they need the grade and should be given a good grade as they won't need this subject ever in real life, and I work with contractors who think everything has an overly conservative factor of safety included in design and a little field adjustments here and there to save them some cost won't be a big issue to the performance of the end product within their 1 year warranty. Children are far easier to manage than adults, especially when the adults are under-educated and don't want to learn anything new, wanting to go party on the lake on their speed boats, and trying to make their profit off the difference in their bids and the labor/materials cost of their work product while beating out all the other guys in the market for the project.

As far as liberal arts goes, I was actually talking about liberal studies, that is not liberal arts, but rather another term in many universities for a degree for primary school teachers. Liberal arts majors actually tend to have more rigid educational requirements in a subject topic than liberal studies.

Finally, there is no "science" of teaching. there are just teachers attempting to validate their concepts by attaching the term science or scientific theory. I am guessing you lack a rudimentary understanding of the requisite nature of science to try and use the term in such a manner. Science must be able to pose theories about the mechanics of natural systems such as the universe. The theories must have rational demonstrable proofs in a unambiguous logical langauge, and have sufficient precision and specificity to design reproducible experiments which should disprove the theories if they are invalid. This trend to seek validity through claiming every form of quack concept is scientific just debases the public belief in the validity of scientific theory. This is why the general public questions well established, proofed, and experimentally tested physics theories because "science" is attached so commonly to justify what are actually non-scientific concepts, much like this guy who was trying to validate reflexology to me by claiming it was also a "science". There has already been a whole series of discussions on what comprises valid science on this forum.

Finally, there is no "science" of teaching. there are just teachers attempting to validate their concepts by attaching the term science or scientific theory.

It's a challenge trying to get a closed-minded individual to understand and appreciate the difficulties of and various approaches to teaching widely varying subjects to different brains with wildly different backgrounds, different capabilities and different preferred learning techniques.

Just because the test object is contained in a human's skull doesn't mean it can't be subjected to rigourous experiment. Or do you consider all psychologists and psychiatrists to be quacks?

I would not consider psychology a science, and there are many psychological concepts that are quackery. Psychological concepts can not by their nature be unambiguous and expressed in a logical language necessary to form a theory. Their precision and accuracy can not be measured through experimentation. Even worse, psychological and sociological works tend to be based on case study, which typically is extremely limited data and frequently highly biased by the subjects involved. In the end it does not represent the mechanics of a system, and thus the concepts tend to be fluid from person to person, society to society and generation to generation and social acceptance and behavioral patterns change. (Even transitions in political organizations and public opinion can substantially change psychological concepts, homosexuality being a prime example of that.) Science is meant to tend to find the underlying immutable mechanics of the system. I suspect the american physical society doesn't routinely change the laws of gravity to fit current politics, public opinion and societal acceptance. As a matter of fact I suspect they would never accept a change proposed by a political organization to a physical theory on the basis of what the current popular opinion was.

Science runs on consensus. There are very few Laws, and they mean what we members of the scientific community agree that they mean. We don't often update the Law of Gravity, but it is subject to updating. Science cannot yet explain certain quantum behaviors, cannot precisely describe any events or matter observed much beyond our Solar System, and cannot predict the position of a molecule of gas.

Just because it's hard to quantify or qualify doesn't exclude an attempted measurement or description from science.

First of all, I have a degree in science. Secondly, you lost any credibility that you may have had when you stated, "Children are far easier to manage than adults."

Just because something doesn't fit your narrow definition, it doesn't exist. That there are thousands of people who say that psychology is a science and testing, experiementation, forming a hypothesis, and testing theory can exist within the realm of human interation doesn't seem to sway you. As for psychology changing the definition of something like homosexuality, in the DSM III I believe it was, and that should suggest it is not a science, didn't science once support the geocentric theory and eventually change its designation. Oh, and yes, I also recall that Pluto was once a planet.

I am done discussing this with you.

Actually, geocentric theory predate the scientific method and was not an accepted scientific theory, but rather a popular concept dating back to the greeks. There was also a heliocentric concept that dated back to the greeks. Only with copernicus did a scientific concept evolve, and was tested by observations by people such as galileo. Keppler developed the theories in the late 16th and early 17th century, which define the rudimentary mechanics of planetary systems. Since then however, I have not heard these scientific theories being changed to fit changes in popular perceptions or political pressures. If the State of California tomorrow decided it was unpopular to believe in the heliocentric model, would physics just change the theory to fit the opinion of the vocal lobbyists? I doubt it. Also surprisingly, though i suspect being a "scientist" you alreay know this, these physical theories can be tested through experimentation and hold up, and the experiments are reproducible (both prerequisites for the scientific method).

Pluto that is a case of taxonomy, which is incidental and not relevent to the science at all. However, the DSM defines mental illness in terms of the symptoms and associated behaviors. It is not a naming converntion gone awry to popular pressures. A defined illness in the DSM is an psychologically accepted mental illness, equivalent to a scientific theory not a naming convention. I do not wish to compare it to a scientific proof of a theory, e.g. Relativity, as there is no such thing as scientific proof to express a theory in psychology. Everything in psychology tends to be wildly variable based on society, time, and subject to extreme observer bias (and personal influences at that time). I doubt you could video tape any average person under a fixed set interview questions and get the same description of their personality traits and flaws from any two psychologists observing the tape, thus nothing is accurately and precisely reproducible for experimentation from observer to observer. So if you can extend the scientific method to be flexible enough to include psychology that same extension would thus allow subjects such as reflexology, herbology, and acuppucncture and many other such topics to also fall within the realm of scientific method or approach. As a rule anything that ends in the suffix ology is a study of something, not science itself. They might applied scientific techniques, but they do not apply the scientific method throughout to determine the mechanics of some system. then most engineers apply more scientific techniques than psychologists. The reason for wanting to be including in as a science is for approval of their expertise on some subject. It is an effective straw man defense against dissenters to call something science, and it actually does not work in physics or chemistry which are at the core of science and the scientific method (and then even fringe chemistry gets off the reservation sometimes).

Actually, I must disagree about there being no scientific evidence for the validity of psychology. I live just round the bend from some big-time fMRI guys and they can demonstrate on a monitor the existence of happy, anxious, etc. 'Tis still in its infancy, to be sure, but it's in there. It's all chemicals and neurons and stuff, so it's just a matter of time till they get it sorted out.

Just to scare the beJesus outta everybody, they're predicting they'll be able to "read minds" from a distance within 5 years. Figure that as typical research grant extension hype and make it really 15 years. Thank god my brain should be pretty empty by then; that'll fool them.

Psychology and the existence of emotions in the human mind are not the same thing. The fact that they can demonstrate through experimentation that emotions as the testee indicate are reflected as an occurence in the human neurological system is not necessarily indicative of a scientific theory, nor a demonstration of the scientific validity of psychology. What this experiment shows you is that what you think you are feeling really occurs in your brain. It shows that thoughts and emotions are expressed in your brain, and through mapping of the neural pathways we can approximate individuals base responses emotions and maybe even very simple thoughts. However, due to amounts of accrued individuality in peoples minds, and physiological differences they, much like any other form of emotional state detectors of the past, would need to customize the testing to each person, and are still likely to see substantial variations. for it to be a scientific theory, you must first posit a rational theory that is well defined to a high degree of both accuracy and precision such that when developing an experiment to test the theory, which must by its nature be designed to disprove the theory, you can make predictions based on that theory that the experiment can quantifiably test for precision and accuracy. the aspect that is chemicals and neurons and such tends to fall under biochemistry and nuerological medicine, the psychological aspect would be how to predict accurately and precisely how a specific a man will react given a specific circumstance. By the way, if you conduct a lot of experiments to develop a large number of data results and best fit equations to that data, that is not science, but rather engineering. It is a reversal of the scientific process, and it still works well enough for most real world applications. In science the theory is supposed to come, sometimes based on observations during experimentation directed at other theories or concepts, first then you conduct a lot of experiments to test the theory. You can make discoveries outside of the scientific method, engineers do this all the time and have been doing it for millenia. We may not know why something happens, but through repeated experiences and experimentation we discovered that under a set of circumstances we obtain specific correlated results, and thus can make some predictions without understanding the actual mechanics of the system.

Sometimes it's just too wet to plow...your not getting it...

you have to have an advanced degree in education within three years of holding your first position, and a minimum of 175 hours of professional development every five years.

I'm not getting it somehow, an advanced degree in education equates to what professionally?

175 hours every five years, so 4-weeks and two days professional development; is this four forty hours weeks ojt in the work force or studying about it.

No I'm not getting it....what is your point?

You need to obtain a Masters level degree if you do not have a Bachelors in education to get your teaching license. That is what I mean by advanced degree. If you do not obtain one, you will lose your teaching license and not be allowed to teach in a public school.

As for professional development, that is training that will help you improve your ability to do the job of educating. These come outside the normal school day and work requirements (it can be an a professional day when students have the day off and teachers are in, I mean outside of the regular school day in that it is in addition to any teaching duties someone has). It could be anything from learning new tech available in your building, taking seminars on special needs students, taking further course work in areas of content or pedagogical theory, attending conferences such as, for me, the National Council for Teachers of English, etc. As an example, I logged 275 hours of PD my first year as a teacher. Most districts I have worked in have teachers who blow the state minimum out of the water.

I was stating that in response to RCE's claim that "Public schools hire non-professional college graduates with no particular advanced educational skills". Teachers must have a lot of professional skill before they enter the profession. My masters program required a full academic year of student teaching two classes (unpaid) in addition to graduate classes and extra seminar work.

I am assuming by non-professional, he means people who have not held positions in the field before they become educators, but I am not sure. My point was that a lot of people that I know work in both professional world and the educational one. For example, I am also a professional writer as well as an English teacher. But even if I wasn't, I was well trained and skilled in the art and science of education before I stepped into my own classroom.

I agree with the first commenter. Most teachers do not have advanced mathematics skills or ability. A few teachers actually major in mathematics or a mathematical science (physics, chemistry, economics, statistics, etc.) in college but most don't. Education degrees are simply too easy to get. Many traditional "business" majors don't get truly advanced mathematics training either nor do many MBA students (business majors at technological universities do). I don't know about New York, but here in New Jersey all that is required to teach is an education bachelor's degree, a 2.75 GPA (C+/B- average) and passing a relatively easy state exam. I have an MS in Mathematics, an MSEE (Electrical Engineering), and a Ph.D. in the same field, and I can tell you that there is no comparison between the mathematics and scientific training of engineers (and true "hard" scientists) and the cursory training of traditionally-trained teachers. As an engineer, I have to use the math and science to solve real problems. If I make a mistake, people die. If a teacher makes one, well, I suppose there's just another high school graduate who can't do algebra, divide fractions, or balance a chemical equation, etc.

I wish I had a son to choose an education for!!!

Is there such a thing as (anonomous giveing)????

For someone who is dead serious to give????

A proven to be place where an actual student would actually become an Air Force Pilot??With computer skills???And possibly electronics thrown in??

I assure you I am serious.

Send me a few links

Joe in Texas

This Forum represents some of the cream of the crop in being a Gentleman.Or Lady.

I largely agree with you. And, I am encouraged to hear what you say about California.

But, I have a comment. If you go to any dental school, most (all?) of the professors have significant experience doing denistry. The same in medical school. The same in law school. And, the same in the tech high schools where the auto mechanics teacher almost surely worked in a garage first.

But, we see that a lot less in science and engineering. I know a bunch of engineering professors emeriti who never spent day one on a job site or on a manufacturing floor.

Not too far from here is one of those hoity-toity private prep schools where Winthrop and Muffy go to await admission to Harvard Law on a legacy. Well, last year, one science teacher decided to do kayaks for a project. Off they went to a forest, cut down a couple trees, ran the wood through the school sawmill (!!), dried it, milled it and built their kayaks. Took them over a half year because they were teenagers and not very good at it. Many of the kayaks were too heavy and unwieldy, but wouldn't you love to get some of those kids into an engineering program!

Professors would be a class of advanced teacher not really as much a professional engineer. However, Many universities require a valid PE license, which does require some working experience and a national (and possible State specific) examination and (depending on the jurisdiction) professional development units each year, prior to being eligible to become a tenured professor in engineering. So most professors of fields such as mechanical and civil engineering have worked, and actually continue to work, as consulting engineers on active projects. so even they have substantial experience performing engineering. Engineering is not about being on the job site or the manufacturing floor, that is just an aid used to facilitate designs to integrate well within current manufacturing and/or construction techniques/limitations employed by the local labor force. If you have one design that works, you know it will work, if the contractors and manufacturing labor/management force with proper labor skill sets are employed. An engineer on a job site is actually a common contractual requirement for a final walk through, unless the owner wishes not to pay the fee. It is similar to a mechanic test driving your vehicle after repairs, except engineers will itemize their cost out better distinguishing the walk throughs from the design aspects, and the mechanic will roll all the cost into one bill. And, well dentists can do similar when you come in for semi annual cleanings, unles they employ a someone else to clean the teeth. I am not sure where a lawyer would test drive his deliverable or product. I have not heard of Lawyers coming back after trials to check up on their clients and verify that they are complying with the Law, as the lawyer had indicated in the trial. I guess you could pay them to do check ups though.

Unintended Consequences? 3 Tuesday, 13 April 2010 15:06

Former science teacher

In my previous private sector job, I made 2.4x what I subsequently earned as a science teacher in a public high school. Between shortages of a variety of resources (textbooks, paper, even chairs), chronic student discipline problems, endless paperwork and continuing ed requirements, it was the most stressful, demanding job I've ever had. There were five other math/science people I knew who went through the same process. None of us lasted more than 2 years in any of the public high-school positions we landed. (A number of us are now safely back in the private sector, working for more pay and better working conditions.) Getting qualified people in math and the sciences to go into teaching has been difficult for years; I can only see it getting substantially harder given the current atmosphere.

Reality check, I was listening to the Oakland School Teachers whining about pay. The example they used was that they earn less than the State average, $38,000 starting out. A EIT who is typically more educated than a teacher on average starts out at about $30,000, and a research physicist will work for years in some government lab to earn that kind of pay scale. A few years back the Oakland School District had to be taken over by the State for repeated consecutive under performance on mandated testing. The test results reflect the work product of the teachers, education of the children, and they had failed repeatedly very badly. Their argument is that they should receive raises because the District has the extra money, after failing for many years so badly, to afford the pay the State mandated administrators policing them (no choice there) their own administration to operate the schools, and operate numerous decentralized smaller schools as mandated to improve performance, which tax payer voted in and agreed to a special property tax to allow. They have seen some increase in performance under this operation scenario, enough to keep them from being taken over by the State again. Surprisingly, as is always the case with unionized teachers, you never here anything about their own performance being above average as a case for a raise increase. I listened to this discussion on the radio from Berkeley for hours while driving, and the arguments by the teachers actually irritated me because they claimed no responsibility in the failing of the district nor any product quality assurance, they all seemed to just claim they should get paid for their educations (which we have all pretty well agreed is typically substandard compared to other majors) and based on the State average (which is based on the good high performing schools as well as the public poorly performing schools). I wonder how they do it in Singapore with 3 times as many students, and outperforming americans in math and science drastically (like grades above american students).

RCE -- You hurt your credibility by failing to mention the city cultural problems that are what makes the teaching job in Oakland so much tougher than almost any engineer or scientist has to face. It's not just about the teachers' college education.

One the other hand the poison of a rigidly protected tenure system for public school teachers is becoming increasingly indefensible. There is nothing else in the American world of work that so effectively protects the poorly performing worker. As long as a teacher does not get convicted of certain serious crimes their tenure protects them from losing the job.

We continue to experiment with superficial solutions to our public school problems only to see failure when the meaningful statistics roll in. The latest such fad is mandatory algebra.

Our real problem is based on a US belief, apparently widely embraced by voters, that "winning isn't everything; it's the only thing". "There is no place for losers and the best way to run the country is to weed them out of the system by whatever means we can as soon as we can. The more losers we weed out the more of the goodies will be there to heap on the winners...... including MEEEE!!"

And the mandatory algebra? Industry loves it. We'll just dump all the dislectic creative geniuses on the trash pile so they can put their talents to work selling drugs in street gangs and learning how to make bombs and shoot an AK47. And at the same time lay off public safety workers; so we can have "NO--NEW--TAXES".

Yes I know I'm drifting off topic; but it's important to talk about just what we need in mandatory National Standards and what we don't. There are important points to be made about how much the standards should focus on the specific talents like math and science that the noisier components of our commerce are screaming for.

Ed Weldon

Stepping out on a limb here but who among us doesn't know ten people whom would call a repair person to fix a leaky faucet or replace an interior door?

I do know my ecological consultant sister can change the struts, injectors, oil, plugs and a flat on the car by herself.

I know most have known others whom though having little formal education couldn't replace their cars battery themselves.

Development of mechanical aptitude creates a wealth within a society which is sorely missed already.

To be a little clearer in my rant.

I was not talking about the elite scholars. For the time being we can always attract the brightest and most energetic students from SE Asia to fill the schools like MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc. I'm talking about the ordinary work that we need so much of. We need lots of people to prepare tissue samples, to program CNC machines, to install broadband, to do the gritty part of environmental cleanup, and so on. Not many PhDs needed there, but a whole lot of technical school graduates or BS holders.

Yet, the nearby college has dropped all electronics courses and added one in humor. Oy vey!

Hey TVP 45,

I received a similar rant from an engineer via email that looks at the converse of this,: what happened when the MBA's (the people that can't do the stuff you bemoan) took over.

I posted excerpts on my blog.

http://pmpaspeakingofprecision.com/2010/03/25/an-engineers-point-of-view/

Enjoy!

milo

I have been a volunteer Science fair judge for students at a few different CPS schools.

It's always been a jaw dropping and eye opening experience.

_______________________________

OMG.. they are giving awards to these kids that don't know the difference between a piece of Styrofoam and a piece of dry ice. (generally speaking.. but it's a true story)

It's BAD

_________________________________

Sadly, the educators, facilitators' and administrators stand there clapping and smiling.. Giving a lot of thumbs up and a pat on the back. to everyone. then they go home.. They don't even look at the projects.. like the judges do.. They don't want to get depressed by them.

It's a huge .. HUGE issue.. very frightening.

We need more people who can use their hands and their minds together.

.. That's the influence of the powers that be

I agree with your assessment. A real example of this is the way the Ag and shop classes that still exist are teaching welding. They are using techniques that were used back in the 1950s. They do not get much experience with 7018 for instance but rather use 6011 and 6013, rods that they will never see in the real world.

I raised 2 boys that both took welding and Ag shop in 2 different schools in 2 different states. One let me come in and help to teach my son and 2 other kids how to really weld. They all went to work right after graduating as welders making good money and their biggest problem was getting the respect for their real ability as the were advanced over the normal grad.

Our schools do not believe that someone should be held back as that will hurt the way they feel about themselves. That is why you have professional basketball players with 4 years of college that cannot read and write. There should be standards for every grade, and if they kid cannot meet those standards they should not be advanced until they can. This is a lesson that is better taught at the age of 7 or 8 than 21.

And the standards should be real, not phony like we have for many athletes. A passing grade should be at least a C not a D like many schools have.

Rich Hurd

Did you miss the survey that found that 99% of our population would rather be an assistant to a celebrity than an MIT professor.

I find that most students don't know what engineers do or that having a job as a skilled tradesperson is desirable. The schools teach that scientists are the people that do the research and invent everything. What is a scientist? I have never met anyone with that occupation. I have seen some scientists on TV such as Dr. Frankenstein.

Personally, I think the problem is both a lot better and worse than the typical poorly-thought-out off-the-cuff opinion. For every 10 persons who don't know how long it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun, there's one who does. That's all we need. Do you seriously think this generation is the first to have a large ignorant segment?

Anyone can b**** and whine about a problem. I get enough of the finding blame game at home with the wife.

Few do anything about it. How about applying these massive brains toward practical solutions? I for one would really enjoy spending time helping out at a high school computer lab, but no one makes it the least bit easy to do. We might start there.

Thank you. It can all help if parents get more involved with schools. You are absolutely right. The school my daughter goes to just started a program called Watch DOGS (Dads Of Great Students). This encourages dads to get involved in their child's school by being there for a day and help in monitoring the halls and classroom. Just by being a presence in school has shown that in not only helps your own child but others as well. It makes the children feel safer and better behaved because their is a man present. Even children that don't have a father figure at home benefit from it because the father that is their can mentor to the fatherless child and be a role model. If a school has more control of the students then all of the students will learn more. I see a lot of parents blame the school system for their child's learning but it all starts at home.

This is a great idea.

We were so fed up with the BS that we home schooled. till freshman year of highschool.

Kids did Great.

They learned levers by taking a bar out and moving a fallen tree.

Setting up a series of pulleys and lifting a known weight and doing long division...

It may not have been the easiest way, but it was the one we chose to assure our kids had what they needed. Not got neglected while the "professional teachers" tried to catch up the rest of the class to where they should have been in the first place.

milo "parents are an important part of the solution."

It is the responsibility of the school to give the opportunity of an education.

Best answer so far....GA

It is I believe the thread subject that the opportunity of certain subjects are being removed from the educational system nationally.

Ditto on establishing personal responsibility.

Case and point. A group of home schoolers were having a field trip at a Pizza restaurant. The manager remarked "This is the first group of students I ever had that really wanted to learn how to make pizza"

And yes, I am implying that home schooling far exceeds public schools in actually teaching.

Actually, the school districts are paid to provide an education to children. Thus they have the responsibility to educate them. When I am paid to provide engineering services, I am legally bound and obligated to provide the services. Somehow, I suspect the idea of a school District, and the individual schools having no responsibility to educate children, but rather the opportunity, would not provide the political leverage you might want when seeking to increase taxes even further to pay for the teachers and administration. I suspect the tax payers are not paying for their children to have an opportunity, but rather they are paying for their children to be educated. Deflecting responsibility away from inadequately skilled and educated administrators and teachers, and wholey back on to the parents may not be the best approach since the parents pay the wages. The teachers and educational administrators are just as much at fault as the parents, and none are fully meeting expectations while shun responsibilities.

Also, it is appalling that parents, who still have to earn a living outside of educating their children, are more capable of educating their children than a person supposedly educated specifically in the practice of educating children who is paid to work full time at educating children (and thus doesn't have to devote that time to earning a living).

RCE,

So are you actually saying that teachers don't earn a living or is it just late and I am not reading this correctly?

I am saying Teachers get paid to educate the children, parents on the other hand have to work to support the family and if they homeschool they teach their children around eaarning a living outside of the activity of educating their children. Obviously Teachers get paid, and paid very well when you compare the benefits such as time off and very minimal pre-requisites and work performance standards.

Very minimal pre-requisites? Very minimal work performance standards? I am not sure where you live, but wherever it is, the state of education there must be very poor. There are some states that receive very poor grades nationally for the delivery of education, and as I have said, I cannot speak to the standards of those states, but in New York, training is rigorous and accountability is important.

If you actually compare hours worked by most teachers in my district, the time worked in a year is quite similar to someone who has all that time off. Assuming that someone works 40 hours per week and 50 weeks per year. Sick leave and personal time is very limited and while you can use it, there is an agreement among teachers, at least where I have worked, that you only use it if you absolutely cannot avoid it.

The opportunity of an education, to me, means that teachers present materials, assign work, and grade that work fairly, applying reasonable penalties for late work. They are organized and efficient, well educated and well prepared. They are flexible to meet the multiple diverse needs of differentiated instruction for heterogeneous learners, while gifted in both whole group and individual remediation. Personally, I try to be engaging and make learning something my students look forward to attending. However, I will not follow them around to make sure they do their work. I will not castigate them for not doing their work. I expect that they have personal responsibility and take ownership over their personal performance. If they need extra help, I am available five days a week, and through e-mail, class Facebook sites, and my website.

If they do not care about how they do, that is their wasted opportunity. Your boss cannot make you do your work if you do not want to do it. He or she can, however, fire you for not doing it. I try to build that understanding that continual failing due to lack of effort or interest does not translate to the working world.

But that is just me. You might also want to see Taylor Mali's take on it.

I have to reply. I know you must be speaking in generalities, and I've known teachers who are woefully uneducated, make more than they are worth, and have an attitude.

Yet, I have to tell you about a poor hillbilly kid in an overcrowded (three grades in the cafeteria/auditorium) school who had a second grade teacher - a missionary's wife, teaching a year to support her husband while he trained for their next mission - who went way out on a limb and took away my Dick and Jane Reader and gave me her copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and told me to sit in the back and read that during the reading class. And, she changed my life. Yet, she had no credentials, lousy pay, and should have been fired for even bringing that book into the school.

Sometimes, perhaps only once in a lifetime, perhaps only for a day (as in that incredible day I spent with the great Eric Rogers who, in six or seven hours, taught me years of Physics), perhaps not even in an academic setting (I learned about baseball sitting beside Red Smith in a bar one evening), we meet teachers (You can recognize them by the fact that they teach) who make a helluva of a difference. I am grateful to those folks, few of whom know just how much I owe them.

When I btch about schools and Departments of Educations, I am not throwing stones at teachers!

TVP45,

I understand completely. It was names like Dave Murphy, Peter Goodfriend, and Buster Cattadella (who helped me get through Calc after a serious head injury turned me from a 95 trig student to a 75 mathematics student for the rest of my career) who inspired me to become a teacher myself. However, it was with my father and grandfather that I learned the rudimentaries of carpentry, auto mechanics, roofing, plumbing, and electronics. Education can come wherever one seeks it.

I will be the first to say that the system needs work. It always will. The needs of education change as fast as the needs of the job markets change. Unfortunately, nothing that big ever moves that fast. I have been helping students develop blogging skills for three years and some are getting quite good at it. However, even my college level course had 75% of it filled with students who had never blogged before. About 2/3 of the remainder had blogged because they took a previous course with me.

There are also teachers out there that need to be out of the game. They are burned out or got into the profession for the wrong reason (the misinformed idea that it was short hours and short years). But most of who I know in the profession not only work EXTREMELY hard to help kids and make a difference in lives, they care deeply about the direction of education. My district has the highest graduation rate in the Capital District of New York and is in the bottom 20% of per pupil expenditure. That doesn't just come from laziness and money.

I just wanted you to know that I appreciate your sentiments. As it is easy to see, I am very passionate about this. Teaching to me is not just a profession. It is a calling.

Here you have touched on another point that seems to be recurrent whenever i hear statistics regarding quality of education (though it seems to be slightly biased when presented by the unions to indicate higher performance from union labor). The lowest student education expenditures by school districts seem to return the highest educational performances by the students. This could indicate a number of things, including that the teachers are irrelevent to the learning process and other factors really are overwhelmingly more influential, such as parental involvement or living conditions. Alternately, it could infdicate that the highly paid teacher have a tendency to go for the quick pay days and as such may have had the same tendency through out their lives and not spent any time learning any skills. One statistic i found unbelievable was that in Georgia I believe it was, they fire 0.33% of the teachers annually, and even the union was implying that was short of their expectations.

the highly paid teacher have a tendency to go for the quick pay days as such may have had the same tendency through out their lives and not spent any time learning any skills

It is breathtaking how much you generalize and the grand assumptions that you make.

The highly paid teacher has generally been at it for 15-20 years AFTER getting a master's degree.

I didn't say that more money spent equals better education. Nor did I say that my district was the lowest paying. The Teachers Association and the administration value the quality of the education delivered, as is supported by the community so assignments get done and taxes are kept as low as possible, while offering the highest amount of extra-curricular activities that the staff can handle and the taxpayers can afford. Dare I mention that the athletic program is #1 in NYS and that the arts (including music) is also top notch. Again, this is only my district, but since that is what you were referencing in my post, I thought I would touch back on it.

teachers are irrelevent to the learning process

Wow. I finally have figured it out. You are just pulling my leg and having some fun. That is the only logical explanation that I can find, other than a complete lack of connection or understanding of the value of interpersonal skills and their impact on the world's daily functioning. For a moment, I thought you were implying that robots or video could do the job as well, if not better, than any teacher could.

Touche, RCE. You have really had me going for several days now.

Just in the state of Missouri, the state budget for education is scary. In Kansas City, 29 of the 60 schools are going to close because the state can not afford to keep them open. My own school district which is about 40 miles northwest of St. Louis is having an open forum meeting next week to discuss the impact of the budget on our district. This is in a little town of less than 10,000 people and our budget is going to be cut by over $400,000. What I don't understand is when things get tight on money in the state and towns, why is education and law enforcement one of the first things to look at to down sizing? Missouri passed a law several years ago to allow gambling casinos to be put up along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and the revenue that the state was going to get from these casinos was supposed to support the education system. I still see the parking lots full of people as I drive by them to go to work every day so where is all of this money that the schools are supposed to be getting from them. But, I do agree with TVP45, the focus on what is being taught is getting out of hand. Reading, writing, and arithmetic should be the main focus with science added in there. If someone wants to be a poet, then that should be something pursued after the general education and not be part of the general education. The general education requirements of the universities are way off base as well. Why do I need archery to learn how to build a bridge? The school systems began to self destruct when they were forced to remove God from the schools. Teachers began to lose control of the classrooms, kids began to bring guns to school and kill other kids. Put God back into the school system and the system will regenerate itself.

Obviously, God in schools is not the answer. It is relevent to observe where the kids with guns committing school massacres occurs, predominantly in "god-fearing" communities. As far as Gang violence goes, more often than not the actual gun related violence is occurring near school grounds with non-students in gagngs involved instigating and providing the guns, if not shooting. The issue really revolves around parental responsibility and teacher responsibilities towards educating the children and keeping them organized to maintain an efficient learning environment. Parents need to teach their children to respect their teachers, and teachers need to be deserving of the respect of both the children and the parents of being a exceptioonal source of useful knowledge that they are willing to convey to the children.

Something to consider also, when discussing cutting budgets. Frequently many agencies use such issues as a means to stream line out the dead weight and retain the better qualified and applicable personnel (or in some corrupt case to retain the most politically useful or astute). The child to teacher ratio in the US is way lower than many other, much poorer countries that perform substantially better than we do at subjects, particularly math and science. In many of those countries you have one teacher doing the work of three american teachers, and getting dramatically better results. Therefore, we might assume we have a substantial number of underperfoming teachers in the industry, when compared to other similar positions around the world. Unfortunately, public school teaching has become the place for college students to focus their future careers when they decide any other major in a university is too demanding or time consuming, and in essence the work efforts they will put forth are not worth the end rewards they expect they might be paid for other degrees. While many poorly educated parents have divested themselves of any responsibility to manage or educate their own children, expecting rather that the State should hande all of that for them. On top of all of this, the technical knowledge base has advanced substantially, and their are many people with relatively useless older knowledge still fighting against advancement in society wanting their fields of training from the 1950s or earlier to continue, even though other countries use robotics for much of that unskilled labor now. And, as always, things were better in the old days, no matter when you talk about the older the person gets the more exaggerated their memory becomes of the "old days". Whether it be walking 5 miles uphill both ways in blizzards and 10 feet of snow for the entire school year, or any other example we have all heard.

Obviously, God in schools is not the answer. It is relevant to observe where the kids with guns committing school massacres occurs, predominantly in "god-fearing" communities.

The comments I've read are well thought-out and pertinent however you are out your depth of this subject. Yes you were answering another post and though the other poster did not detail the comment your answer doesn't adequately address the subject because it is a cultural shift a work. If taken in the context of a cultural shift returning to the former three generations would pass before real change would begin to occur towards a reenforcement of virtues lost.

A return to what once worked is a tried and true method of correcting and error of judgement incidently...

The difference isn't actually that incidents occur. We have had school age children committing murders and violence for centuries, we just didn't send most of them to school after 6th grade (if at all) up until post WWII. What is different today from the 1950s, besides the obvious longing of many to return to a childhood that in all likelihood was not as great as they are now recalling 60 years later. The real difference was the media attention and the accessibility of public media. You can learn about events anywhere in the country within minutes of them occurring, usually reported with a strong bias towards sensationalism and exageration in order to get them out fast and get people to view it. The fact that children can be more prone to commit massacres on school grounds, well that should be obvious, they get more media attention that is distributed to many more people. The business of making news is no longer local newpapers, and you have to compete with Paris hilton or the Kardashians to get media attentions, thus these childen do the things necessary to get media attention. More parental involvement would head most of this public attention-seeking off. That is really where the issue lies, no in god, as we know many god fearing people have committed heinous crimes.

This is somewhat entertaining... http://www.theonion.com/articles/increasing-number-of-parents-opting-to-have-childr,17159/

Please excuse I couldn't refrain the truth is often funnier than a big nasty lie...

Child: God, why did you let those kids get killed in that school?

God: Didn't you know? I am not allowed in schools anymore.

Since I started this rant, I want to clarify a few things:

This is not meant to be "teacher-bashing." Our schools teach what we tell them to through our elected officials. Trained pedagogues are the proper people to be doing this job.

I have been a fan of the New York Regents for decades and continue to be. They often put their "money where their mouths are." They even, at least in principle, support the idea of equivalence between practical knowledge and academic knowledge.

I am not casting aspersions on PhDs. We need several in almost every state in the Union. I am decrying the lack of balance in the school system.

We live in a world that is completely dependent on electricity and oil. The typical student knows nothing about either one. Nor about commercial law. Nor about the functioning of a global, "flat" economy. If you doubt this, go to any college campus, stop a half dozen students and ask them the current value of the Yuan. Then ask them what the value should be.

I think it unsustainable to continue training every youngster for a "seat doctorate" and a $100 000 (USD) student debt only to have them applying for jobs at $12 an hour. We need more people to operate EDM stations than we do to write valid syllogisms.

I think it unsustainable to continue training every youngster for a "seat doctorate" and a $100 000 (USD) student debt only to have them applying for jobs at $12 an hour.

I totally agree. And the school I attended is one of three in the area that costs at least $50,000/year. I know many students getting a bachelors degree and being $100,000 in debt already.

So it sounds like the first thing young people need to be educated in is basic economics......don't borrow $100,000 if you can't pay it back with what you invested it in within a reasonable period of time. .

That is true, but when the expectation is that they will attend college from the age that they can walk, I think it is a difficult concept to get your head around. I also think that the number is so huge, that some can't grasp it.

Or there is a disconnect in terms of what they think they will earn when they graduate and what they actually do earn.

"...when the expectation is ..."

Well that may be some of the root of the problem - unrealistic expectations. Kids spend their childhood playing video games and watching TV, sent to schools that care more about not hurting their feelings than giving them the grade they deserve, they spend their lives watching society (governments, parents, etc.) borrowing money way beyond their means and then we wonder why they make poor financial decisions when they go to college.

Hmmm perhaps if society set a better example by living within our means and expect them to be responsible for themselves things might be a bit different.

Fair enough, JB.

Sorry for the rant....I've got two kids in elementary school and what I see just makes me sick.