Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-na-obama-education25-2009feb25,0,2871040.story?track=rss
Los Angeles Times, by Frank James
“Right now, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma,” Obama said. “And yet, just over half of our citizens have that level of education. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation. And half of the students who begin college never finish.”
Here’s a difficult question… “Why?” Why might it be the case in the United States that we have 2 large issues with dropout rates at the secondary and collegiate levels?”
The answer… Relevancy. In the United States, while education has been a key to many answers for the “good” life, education was molded into career track training long before standards ever took hold. Long before much else in our contemporary educational environment took hold, job training was the status quo in education by the turn of the last century (1900). The basic “rules” of only speaking when spoken to, following orders, tracking students in “career paths”, were ALL meant in some way, shape, or form, to prepare the student for the working world. Education was never meant to bring a student to a realization that they could mold their own success outside of academia.
Yet, this is precisely what many leaders of business and industry recognized a long time ago. If they were to become successful their education was outside academia; rather it was in other venues and pursued diligently on their own. The amount of industry leaders from the early days of US business to our current age who have no more than a HS diploma is still shocking to most, becuase as people specialize educationally, they become a nitch employee, and an employee at best… because they are unsuited for other positions. Think of the majority of enginneers, software programmers, teachers, etc. All are good employees and rarely are any bold enough to strike it out on their own.
What then must be done in education? Competition though market competitiveness, not standards. Customization through consumer control of the process, not through tracking. How is this to be accomplished? Simple… the gradual removal of the barriers placed upon the education industry by the current ’supposed’ stakeholders of that industry… the government. The stakeholders of education are those partaking in the educational process… the students and their “mentors” (parent/guardians and teachers). Control, competition, customization for the student, by the student and his/her stakeholders is probably the only path by which education will truely become what is needed. Any other means, as history has proven, becomes both an ineffective hybrid of government/citizen management and “bothersome” intrusion on the actual stakeholders end.
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