Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from
The New York Times is an opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof (a columnist who is hard to pigeonhole as 'left' or 'right') that touches on
Thucydides' last posts:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-the-american-dream-is-leaving-america.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad&_r=0
The American Dream Is Leaving America
Nicholas Kristof
OCT. 25, 2014
THE best escalator to opportunity in America is education. But a new study underscores that the escalator is broken.
We expect each generation to do better, but, currently, more young American men have less education (29 percent) than their parents than have more education (20 percent).
Among young Americans whose parents didn’t graduate from high school, only 5 percent make it through college themselves. In other rich countries, the figure is 23 percent.
The United States is devoting billions of dollars to compete with Russia militarily, but maybe we should try to compete educationally. Russia now has the largest percentage of adults with a university education of any industrialized country — a position once held by the United States, although we’re plunging in that roster.
These figures come from
the annual survey of education from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., and it should be a shock to Americans.
A basic element of the American dream is equal access to education as the lubricant of social and economic mobility. But the American dream seems to have emigrated because many countries do better than the United States in educational mobility, according to the O.E.C.D. study.
As recently as 2000, the United States still ranked second in the share of the population with a college degree. Now we have dropped to fifth. Among 25-to-34-year-olds — a glimpse of how we will rank in the future — we rank 12th, while once-impoverished South Korea tops the list.
A new Pew survey finds that Americans consider the greatest threat to our country to be the growing gap between the rich and poor. Yet we have constructed an education system, dependent on local property taxes, that provides great schools for the rich kids in the suburbs who need the least help, and broken, dangerous schools for inner-city children who desperately need a helping hand. Too often, America’s education system amplifies not opportunity but inequality.
My dad was a World War II refugee who fled Ukraine and Romania and eventually made his way to France. He spoke perfect French, and Paris would have been a natural place to settle. But he felt that France was stratified and would offer little opportunity to a penniless Eastern European refugee, or even to his children a generation later, so he set out for the United States. He didn’t speak English, but, on arrival in 1951, he bought a copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times and began to teach himself — and then he worked his way through Reed College and the University of Chicago, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a university professor.
He rode the American dream to success; so did his only child. But while he was right in 1951 to bet on opportunity in America rather than Europe, these days he would perhaps be wrong. Researchers find economic and educational mobility are now greater in Europe than in America.
That’s particularly sad because,
as my Times colleague Eduardo Porter noted last month, egalitarian education used to be America’s strong suit. European countries excelled at first-rate education for the elites, but the United States led the way in mass education.
Then the United States was the first major country, in the 1930s, in which a majority of children attended high school. By contrast, as late as 1957, only 9 percent of 17-year-olds in Britain were in school.
Until the 1970s, we were pre-eminent in mass education, and
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz of Harvard University argue powerfully that this was the secret to America’s economic rise. Then we blew it, and the latest O.E.C.D. report underscores how the rest of the world is eclipsing us.
In effect, the United States has become 19th-century Britain: We provide superb education for elites, but we falter at mass education.
In particular, we fail at early education. Across the O.E.C.D., an average of 70 percent of 3-year-olds are enrolled in education programs. In the United States, it’s 38 percent.
In some quarters, there’s a perception that American teachers are lazy. But the O.E.C.D. report indicates that American teachers work far longer hours than their counterparts abroad. Yet American teachers earn 68 percent as much as the average American college-educated worker, while the O.E.C.D. average is 88 percent.
Fixing the education system is the civil rights challenge of our era. A starting point is to embrace an ethos that was born in America but is now an expatriate: that we owe all children a fair start in life in the form of access to an education escalator.
Let’s fix the escalator.
Let's, indeed, "fix the escalator," but let's make sure, first, that it's headed to someplace we
want need to go ... let's fix the right escalator.
Richard Haas,
tweeted, in response to Mr Kristol's column, ".@NickKristof on why making quality education available to all is key to reducing inequality-& why America is failing". There is one key word in Dr Haas' brief
tweet that is missing in Mr Kristof's column and in the sources he cites:
"quality."
Going back a few
years decades centuries, education, beyond enough "readin' and writin'" to understand one's bible (the reason John Knox introduced universal elementary into Scotland in the 16th century) and keep a simple account book (the reason all those Hudson's Bay Company
factors were Scots in the 17th and 18th centuries) was, indeed, the purview of the
elites and it was a very
general (liberal arts) education ~ heavy on philosophy and the classics and theology. Doctors, lawyers and engineers were
trained, rather then being
educated, as skilled
practitioners ~ they didn't need to be 'gentlemen' or, therefore, 'educated.' That changed in the 19th century when we put a premium on
certification ~ but some professions, most notably, medicine and the law, never bought, wholly, into the notion that one could learn to be a doctor or a lawyer in a university: that's why we still require MDs to do internships and residencies and why law school graduates must "article" before attempting the bar exam. It's also why engineers, for example, require a second level of
certification, by their professional associations, before being "professional engineers." (I know, I know, many people think the professions are little better than trade unions, protecting a 'closed shop,' and there is, certainly, some truth in that ~ but there is more truth in the notion that the professions don't quite trust the universities.)
In the 20th century we moved even farther down the
certification path: faculties like commerce (and the MBA), education and journalism were allowed to create academic disciplines from what are, essentially,
crafts.
But there as a problem that became evident in the 1950s and '60s in America: the American public education system did not, because it could not, prepare
everyone for university. But the US equivalent of our
Laurentian elites demanded rigid adherence to the principle of equality and when blacks and white 'succeeded' at different rates they took it as being self-evident that a lack of equality was the problem ... and they were, largely, right. Elementary and secondary education were not, and still are not, anything like "equal" in
quality in the US or Canada. There are a whole host of social and economic reasons for that - ranging from income inequality (higher income people tend to live in defined neighbourhoods and they pay higher taxes for better schools) to less tractable social problems (well educated parents have books in the home, they 'value' education and help their children succeed; low income people often cannot do either) - and throwing money at e.g. inner city schools didn't help (because of the social problems, putting lipstick on am pig, etc).
The solution was to pass almost everyone into university ... where,
quelle surprise!, a huge slice of the freshman intake failed.
The solution to that problem was to create programmes that anyone could pass and, thereby, earn a BA; programmes like: Afro-American Studies, Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Journalism, Gastronomy, Emerging media studies (all those were taken from the web site of a 'high quality' US university which ranks in the top 100 of some "Top World University" lists). I'm sorry but graduating with any of those degrees does
NOT equate to being educated.
Our universities can and should serve two functions:
1. Provide a broad, general education ~ which will, I'm afraid, be of most 'use' to the
elites, but are also excellent 'foundation' programmes for teachers; and
2. Provide specialized educations to prepare people to enter several skilled occupations: scientists, obviously, doctors and lawyers (and theologians), too, and engineers and accountants and so on;
whatever
the real market demands.
Most young people in Canada and the USA do not need a university education. Most useful skills can be learned on the job (apprenticeship or just starting to the bottom) of in a local 'community college.'
University is valuable ... and expensive. It is too valuable to be wasted on the majority of the young people who are there right now.
