Some sense about useless education

In a small office at the public high school in Kingsford, Mich., guidance counselor Kip Beaudoin is doing what many parents might consider treachery: He's encouraging a student to just say "no" to college. Senior Will Anderson tells Beaudoin that his parents are pressuring him to apply - that his mother "is always thinking, 'Be a doctor, be something.'" But Anderson says his passion has always been working on cars. He sees college as a waste of time. "I don't need math, science. I just need to learn what I need to learn and get out there," he says.

In recent decades, the number of U.S. high-school graduates who begin college has risen dramatically. But so has the number of college dropouts. Beaudoin is one of many educators who think these figures reflect a growing pressure on students to follow the college track, even when they might be better suited to other options.

When Anderson graduates from high school, he plans to enroll in an automobile mechanics' apprentice program, with Beaudoin's encouragement. But more often than not, Beaudoin says, parents consider such advice a betrayal. "Mostly what you get is, 'Are you telling me my son or daughter is not capable of doing better?'" Beaudoin says.

Joe Lamacchia, a father of five from Holliston, Mass., says teachers often made it sound as if his children would "fall right off the Earth if they didn't go to college." "It was incredible how they really believed that," he says. Lamacchia himself skipped college, and it's fine by him if his children do, too. A few years ago, Lamacchia launched something of a crusade to encourage youths who want to skip college; he even has a Web site. "When you have a trade, you have it made," he says, noting that skilled workers, such as electricians or welders, can easily earn as much as $70,000 a year with overtime. After barely finishing high school, Lamacchia started cutting grass with a borrowed mower. Today, he runs a $2 million a year landscaping and driveway-paving business. "It's a great life - blue collar," he says.

Currently, there's a shortage of blue-collar workers for manual and technical jobs - from electricians to heating and air-conditioning mechanics to iron and metal workers. As demand for these skills increases in coming years, economists say wages will, too.

But economists also caution that skipping college today is much riskier than it was a generation ago. "It's a bit of fool's gold to think that you can drop out of school today and think that you can do particularly well in the U.S. economy in the long run," says Harvard economist Larry Katz. Katz says skilled workers can earn good wages early in their careers, but their earnings cap out early, too. Ultimately, he says, college graduates will make about 60 percent more than those without a degree.

Harvard economist Claudia Golden adds that, more than ever before, students need more education and more highly technical computer skills to perform even blue-collar jobs such as welding, manufacturing and fixing cars. "Perhaps they had a grandfather who did perfectly fine," she says, "and they think they can as well. But in the economy of the 21st century, they're going to do very, very poorly."

At Kingsford High, Will Anderson spends two hours every day in an automobile mechanics class that includes training in the latest computer technology. But fewer high schools offer comprehensive vocational education anymore.

Still, Harry Chapman, who teaches chemistry at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Ky., says he often encounters students who should have been told long ago that they don't belong in college. "We don't have trouble telling someone they're not suited to be a musician or football player or something like that," Chapman says. "But for the most part, we won't tell someone [that] we don't think they can make it as a doctor or an engineer. It's like an insult."

Rob MacDonald, 25, from Waltham, Mass., wishes he had been better advised. He tried college, then quit - but not before racking up nearly $40,000 in debt. "You don't realize it at the time, when you're going to school, that you're going to have so much debt when you're done," he says. "You don't realize it until you come out." MacDonald now works as a site supervisor for Joe Lamacchia, making $50,000 a year. He's almost done paying off his student loans. And instead of suffering through sociology class, he says he now looks forward to what he does every day.

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THE BRITISH SCHOOL PANIC

Getting your kid into a High School where he/she will both be safe and get a good education is not easy in modern Britain

So we didn’t win the state lottery: the best school in our area, our No 1 choice, turned us down. But then the odds were pretty stacked. Hearing about the oversubscribed Brighton school with 420 children chasing 300 places, I could hear London parents crying “Lightweights!” Try 3,000 applicants for 150 places.

A bus journey across Brighton to your second choice of, what, two miles max? Try sticking your tender 11-year-old on an hour-long walk-train-bus-walk schlep. Only got your third choice at the slightly less laurelled comp? Imagine getting none of your six choices and your daughter being allocated a girls’ school closed one day recently for fear of a drive-by shooting.

Sorry. Forgive me. I have been half-crazy for the past five months. I’ve avoided friends, turned down invitations. Monomaniacs, I know, are miserable funsuckers. And my head has contained one subject, spun into a myriad of permutations: which secondary school will my son attend in September? By January I’d started, for the first time, to read my horoscope. Then my son’s horoscope. Then I regressed to teenage superstitions: if I reach the bus stop before that red car passes me, he’ll get in . . . “I told you it was bad,” said a friend, who went through this a year ago. But not this bad. Perhaps she’d played it down, she conceded, because she’d felt — as I do now — silly and ashamed to admit how much she’d cared, how such a mundane event had taken over her life, stopped her sleeping right for half a year. And she’s no neurotic London yummy-mummy cliche either. Neither is another otherwise level-headed friend who’s sure the onset of a serious medical condition was sparked by her own Year 6 hell.

Why does this process rattle us so? Why were Brighton parents baying at each other across the council chamber? Because the difference between a failing school and a successful one throws up, deep in the insomniac night, two future visions of your child: an unemployable bifta-smoking wretch and a ten A-starred, shiny superbeing. And the thought of this being decided randomly by municipal computer is too much to bear.

But the best schools will only ever have so many places (even with the Tories’ wheeze that they should simply expand: like where, I often think, looking at cramped city sites? Into the middle of the main road?). And how can one complain that a fellow taxpayer who lives across town — because she can’t afford the premium-price houses abutting that school — has no right to seek a place for her child? Except that her chance reduces your own sense of control.

Politicians talk about choice, but control is what we really mean. And control is the greatest privilege of wealth. The richer we become as a society, the more we demand it, until many of us expect absolute dominion over every aspect of our lives. We are, in marketing jargon, a generation of “maximisers” who, whether buying a holiday, a fridge or a facelift, vigorously research every decision. School league tables can be a fast-track to insanity.

Other countries may send kids unthinkingly to the nearest school, assuming it will be fine. And we beat ourselves up believing that every Dutch or Spanish school is superior to anything we can create, that foreign children are superior to our own blighted youth. If only you could shop around before birth . . . Or maybe we are more individualistic, selfish even, not satisfied with good, only the best. And yet education in our overcrowded island can only be a lottery. Brighton is simply mutating from a town to the city it campaigned so vigorously to be. “It is all but impossible for parents, particularly in urban areas,” said the Commons Education Select Committee, “to exercise their preference with any degree of certainty.”

Even if — as we did — you hedge your bets by also applying to private schools, this is just a second lottery, albeit a super high-stakes golden rollover. There can be no other financial transaction where you stand waving a cheque for what, over seven years, will be pushing 100,000 pounds, hoping, praying, begging for someone to be gracious enough to take it. Only a millionaire who’d spawned a genius could truly enjoy control.

And of the two lotteries, the private is the more nerve-shattering. At least with the state system any shortening of the odds — moving house, attending church — is done by the parents. Going private means it is down to the child, who must be crammed, nagged, beseeched into taking a four-hour test — when a state primary child may never knowingly have taken an exam in his life — then submitted to interviews to be probed and measured, sorted and rejected. The thing about selection, I thought, as my wheyfaced son set off with his pencil case to yet another school gym, is it’s so damn selective.

There is no doubt, particularly in London, that the school lottery can throw children into grim, hostile places no one would ever choose. But secondary transfer is stressful for all parents, because it marks an end to our power. Children are at last granted the freedom that earlier generations had aged 8 or 9. On your child’s 11th birthday, you reach the brow of a hill and look down over a vast, open landscape. Our ability to care and protect, tying that scarf snugly around his neck against the cold, is over. He will hurtle out of the house, scarfless, a head full of unknowable thoughts, and you have ceded control to him. And then the real lottery begins.

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The decline of Australia's schools

Julie Bishop, the federal Education Minister, was quite matter-of-fact on The 7.30 Report on Wednesday night. "About a third of our 15-year-olds are functionally illiterate." Left unspoken were two other obvious conclusions:

First, these were kids their teachers had given up on. Second, their parents lacked the ability or inclination to rectify the problem at home. For the first time since the mid-19th century, reading has become a chore adults quite commonly delegated to other people and inter-generational illiteracy is becoming an entrenched dimension of disadvantage.

It's with this grim view of the present and the foreseeable future in mind that we should take on board last week's report from the Productivity Commission. As usual, it beat the drum on the benefits of reforming energy markets, transport and infrastructure; unfinished business that can further enhance national prosperity. But it stressed the need for a new agenda: human capital reform. Partly this was a matter of reducing chronic disease and injury to ensure fewer people are excluded from the work force. Partly it was a matter of reforming tax and welfare systems to increase incentives to work. Mostly it was about education.

If ever there were a time for a back-to-basics approach, the Productivity Commission says it is now. The agenda takes in improving early childhood education, literacy and numeracy, better school completion rates and skills training. It estimates substantial reform could add 9 per cent to economic output during the next 25 years, increase household incomes by an average $1800 and lift workforce participation by nearly 5 per cent. It also calculates that during that time it could boost state and federal revenues by up to $25 billion.

The Productivity Commission's brief is to imagine how much better off we'd all be in a more rationally ordered world. Sceptics tend to share Kant's intuition that "out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made". But even so, within living memory, before 1970, we know that ordinary state school students were regularly achieving much higher levels of literacy and numeracy than their present counterparts. Is it too much to ask the current crop of schoolteachers to replicate these results?

According to the annual Schools Australia report, released on Monday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, an increasing number of parents think it is. They are giving up on public education in hordes and droves. In the past decade, private schools have grown at nearly 20 times the rate of government schools. The number of state school students has risen by just 1.2 per cent since 1996, compared with 21.5 per cent for Catholic and independent schools, to say nothing of the more radical option of home schooling, for which reliable statistics are hard to find. In Victoria, where dissatisfaction with public education has long been an issue and nearly 40 per cent of senior secondary students are educated privately, overall enrolments remained relatively steady. In South Australia during the decade, government school enrolments fell by 7.7 per cent and in the ACT by 12.3 per cent.

These regional collapses of confidence in public education are certainly spectacular but they need to be seen against the backdrop of long-term change. Since the Karmel report in 1975 and the era of substantial public funding of non-government schools, there has been a fairly steady drift to the private sector. Jack Keating, an educationist at the University of Melbourne, reckons it at about 0.4 per cent a year. Last year 66.8 per cent of Australian children were in government schools and 33.2per cent in the private sector. If, as seems inevitable, the rest of the country follows Victoria's example, the ratio will soon be 64.6per cent to 35.4 per cent.

The question everyone in the political class is tiptoeing around is this. At what point do most public schools simply become sinks of disadvantage, places where a residue of kids with average or below average IQs and more than their fair share of other problems confound everyone's efforts to teach them life's basic survival skills? You could re-formulate the question by asking: at what stage does the abandonment of public-sector education by what used to be called the lower middle classes reach a tipping point?

Some compare the presence of parents who work in the professions to the proverbial "leaven in the lump" of a school community; the dads who are likeliest to coach the soccer team and the mums who volunteer to teach remedial reading. Others, less sentimentally, say that petit bourgeois parents are good at getting grants and zebra crossings out of local MPs because they're more effective at making formal complaints and marketing grievances to the media. Those parents and their children are gravitating towards the larger, academically successful and selective public schools, which are likely to stay that way while most of the smaller, academically weaker schools will stay small and become weaker still. That means average students are probably going to be increasingly short-changed, as the burden of looking after the overall educational needs of communities in non-selective schools becomes a more thankless task, entrusted to an increasingly demoralised bunch of teachers.

There was a time when I would have greeted any decline in public-sector education as a cause for celebration. I still think that a great many state teachers and their appalling unions have preyed like parasites on the long-suffering proletariat. The trouble is that the private sector often employs the same kinds of teachers, is politically correct and third rate in much the same ways and is infected with many of the same fads and questionable methods.

The Catholic parochial system, for example, is almost beyond parody. The values and formation it purports to instil in its pupils is anything but Catholic. Father O'Bubblegum, Auberon Waugh's comic creation, can still be found strumming his guitar and singing the lyrics of John Lennon's Imagine, with no sense of incongruity, at school masses. Vatican II-era nuns can still be heard pushing the feminist pieties and Marxist Sociology 101 they learned as mature-age entrants in diploma courses 30 years ago. Lay teachers who are often neither Catholic nor discernibly Christian are entrusted with religious instruction.

It is scarcely surprising that so few of the kids passing through the system should still be going to church even one Sunday a month by the time they're 20. Apart from the Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, few Australian Catholic bishops have attempted any sort of reform or reined in their education bureaucracies. Some profess themselves powerless to do so. Accordingly, there has been a marked trend in recent years for traditionally minded Catholic parents to send their children to Anglican or Lutheran schools where, whatever else is lacking, at least the biblical catechesis is adequate.

While the Catholic schools are more aggressively ordinary and anti-intellectual, there's no shortage of paid-up philistines in the independent schools. And let's not forget the genteel ideologues. The social justice wing of the Uniting Church is over-represented, as are the deep greens, people who won't teach phonics and the social studies teachers who fancy themselves in "Sorry" T-shirts. It's gratifying to see how many of the young survive their ministrations with critical faculties intact and a sceptical, often explicitly conservative attitude to all the codswallop they've been taught.

A great deal more could and no doubt should be said about the shortcomings of Australia's Catholic and independent schools. But, whatever private education's failings, if what we conceive as the public sector is to remain viable it is going to have to become much more like its private competition. Whether along the lines of charter schools or various hybrids, public schools urgently need to be rebadged and given a new remit. The less they operate like government agencies, the more confidence they're likely to inspire in parents. The more power parents and principals have, at the expense of head office and the unions, the better the chance of shifting demoralised or incompetent staff and boosting morale. Performance-linked pay is another overdue development.

In the rebadge exercise, there should be a rethink of the ownership and control of schools that aims to capture the benefits that come when an enterprise is owned (and loved) by the people who work there, or even by an individual, rather than by the state. For example, short of outright sale, there's a case to be made for leasing existing public school premises at peppercorn rentals to the entrepreneurial heads of the low-fee colleges that are burgeoning on the outskirts of most of the capital cities. Some, I'm sure, would leap at the chance to take over deadbeat schools, lock, stock and barrel and run them more or less non-selectively on a state subsidy, which would in all likelihood be a fraction of the present cost. In a market system, as Keating argued in The Age last week, they should be rewarded for taking on the most challenging and disadvantaged pupils.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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