REALITY BITES

As rebellious teenagers they chanted "we don't need no education", but 25 years later the former pupils from Islington Green School disagree with the sentiment of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall". The Times has tracked down the anonymous choir members who once called for their teacher to "leave those kids alone" and found that, as well as pursuing a legal action for unpaid royalties from the song, they are now singing from a rather different hymn sheet.

Ian Abbott, 40, was one of 13 pupils whom their music teacher, Alun Renshaw, sneaked into the Britannia Row studios to record the chorus for the song in 1979. "We don't need no education does not hold, especially with children," he said at the weekend. "Some of my nieces, for example, have been having problems at school. I say to them: 'You must knuckle down', and they say: 'But why? Look at what you sang'.

"But education is so important. I really regret the fact that I did not do an awful lot at school and I would like to go to university now and get a degree. But work gets in the way when you get older."

With Pink Floyd in tax exile, the pupils, aged 12 to 15, never met the band and were robbed of fame because Margaret Maden, their infuriated head teacher, banned any publicity when told of the controversial lyrics. She had been brought in to turn around Islington Green School, then regarded as a sink-estate school. She had sought to increase the number of children from Islington's new influx of middle-class families.

Now a respected educationist, Professor Maden said: "The influence of middle-class and ethnic children was quite palpable on all kids. We believed in a balanced intake and this reflected the area we were in."

Tabitha Mellor, 38, now a teacher in Hackney, said: "There was a real mix of Cockney and the bohemian middle class. We were lucky to have that education and I was privileged to have lived in such an area. Maden was fantastic because I think she got the highest grades ever and saw us right through. She was an educational genius and was one of the inspirations for me to become a teacher. I now try to inspire my kids like that. It helps that I can tell them that I had a No 1."

Mirabai Narayan, the granddaughter of Stephen Swingler, the former Labour minister, is now a learning mentor dealing with problem children at a primary school in Camden. She said: "It's strange now because I do wonder whether that song has influenced my choice of career. My job now is to help to overcome barriers to learning for kids and if I listen to the song now it makes me shiver - especially the line about `dark sarcasm'. Nowadays as teachers we are told never to use sarcasm with children."

Source





THE FALLACY OF "INVESTING" IN HIGHER EDUCATION

A recent New York Times op-ed by economist Jeff Madrick takes the tone and sophistication of a cable-TV ad in trying to convince Americans that we need to toss more money into subsidizing college education for students. "To economists," Madrick writes, "higher education is like motherhood or apple pie. It will cure just about anything, from globalization and outsourcing to technological change and income inequality." Wow! Get my credit card and hand me the phone! Madrick admits to some hyperbole in that sentence, but proceeds to argue seriously that the taxpayers would be foolish not to spend more on higher education for more students. Why?

For one thing, people who have college degrees earn more, on average, than people without them. Quoting Madrick, "According to the 2000 census, for example, the median income of an American man with a college degree was about $52,200, 60 percent higher than the $31,600 for those with a high school degree." He doesn't explicitly draw the conclusion, but apparently Madrick believes it follows that individuals who didn't pursue college would necessarily have had higher earnings had they done so, as if there were some automatic connection between years of formal education and earnings.

And that is nonsense. Rather than looking at median earnings of the two groups, which for college graduates is pulled up greatly by the superwealthy (Michael Jordan, for example) and for nongraduates is pulled down by many people who scarcely work at all, we should focus on individuals at the margin. That is, among those people who might have gone to college but chose not to, would their earnings be significantly higher if they had gotten a degree? Consider a young man who has just graduated from high school with mediocre grades and an SAT score that could have landed him a place in one of the nation's many nonselective colleges. He decides that he would rather just start earning a living; so instead of applying to colleges, he enrolls in a school that teaches auto mechanics. After a few months of study, he is ready to start working and gets a job as a trainee mechanic at an auto dealership.

Did he make the wrong choice? Would his financial future be better if he had gone to college instead? It is hard to see that it would be. He wouldn't be paid more as a mechanic for having first obtained a bachelor's degree before learning that trade, and would be in the hole for all the costs and forgone earnings of his college years.

But, Madrick would probably reply, he would have become qualified to pursue many other, higher paying jobs. The trouble with that argument is that there are many people today with college degrees who have learned that they aren't the guarantee of high-income employment that they had supposed. One of our hypothetical auto mechanic's classmates might have chosen to enroll in at a nonselective university, earned a degree in any of dozens of popular majors, and after graduation entered the job market only to find that the best job he could get was delivering pizza. In her book Bright College Years, Anne Matthews noted that a third of the Domino's pizza deliverers in the Washington, D.C., area have B.A. degrees. Such anecdotal evidence of the fact that a degree is no assurance of landing a good job was backed up by economists Frederic Pryor and David Schaffer in their book Who's Not Working and Why, in which they noted that an increasing percentage of college graduates are taking what used to be regarded as "high school jobs."

The dirty little secret behind the glossy promotional material so carefully crafted by colleges and universities is that many will accept just about anyone, and in order to keep students happy enough to stay in school-and paying, of course-the academic requirements are abysmal. A large percentage of the students enrolled in college today are what Professor Paul Trout calls "disengaged students." They are in college just because they want a credential, not because they have any desire to learn. They don't read, resent assignments, won't accept criticism, and are quick to complain about professors who don't treat them the way they want. Hordes of those young people, most of them educationally handicapped by their years in government schools, get degrees every year, but are turned down for jobs more demanding than delivering for Domino's or serving Starbucks.

Pryor and Schaffer write that "The low functional literacy of many university graduates represents a serious indictment against the standards of the U.S. higher educational system." Actually, it is an indictment against the standards of the entire government education system. The crucial point is that sending even more of these students through college will do no one any good. It won't make the slightest dent in that "liberal" b^te noire, income inequality, to confer college degrees on still more marginal students. Nor will it stop outsourcing. Sometimes American firms turn to workers in other countries when they can't find the labor they need here, but that alleged problem won't be solved by sending more young Americans on a four-, five-, or six-year detour through college where they will learn little of any use.

But isn't it true that more and more jobs require a college education? Recently, I have been looking at an array of employment ads and have observed that many jobs which call for little background skill or knowledge-for example, bank teller, purchasing agent, loan officer-now "require" a college degree. That doesn't mean, however, that the work is so intellectually demanding that it couldn't be done by someone without the supposed skills of a college graduate. It simply indicates is that the employer has decided to use the absence of a degree as a preliminary screening device, concluding that since so many young people now go to college, it's reasonable to assume that anyone who hasn't would be difficult to train. (As further proof that these "requirements" often have nothing to do with skill or knowledge, I also found cases where two companies were hiring for the same job, one insisting that applicants have a degree and the other not.)

Thanks to subsidies, including the very low tuition at many state universities, we already have far too many students going to college. What students need and employers want is not the paper credential of a college degree, but trainability. If you really desire to give the poor an opportunity for a better life than menial labor, don't put them through college. Instead, make sure that they get a solid primary education so they can use English well and handle basic math. Doing that doesn't require more "investment" in college, but radical change in our woeful K-12 system.

Source

***************************

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.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

***************************