Beginning in the 1950’s, largely because of the G.I. Bill, America started becoming the best educated country in the world—if you measure that rubric by the number of people with post-secondary educations.
Through out the ‘50’s and even into the ensuing decade, the vast majority of college enrollees waded into curricula that really hadn’t changed much since the 19th century, to wit, curricula heavily slanted toward the liberal arts. The sciences and math weren’t ignored, far from it, but they weren’t the focus either.
That began changing during the Kennedy administration when the great “race to the moon” commenced and JFK urged young Americans to get much more heavily into math and the sciences.
Among the results of that push were a period of American dominance in hard sciences like Physics and Chemistry, and in applied sciences like Engineering, rocket science and bio-engineering that stretched through the 1970’s, 1980’s and even into the 1990’s. American graduate programs became the envy of the world, and both the universityies that supported those programs and the country as a whole benefitted enormously from the inflow of the best young minds from Europe and Asia clamoring for admission to American universities.
Despite the high profile that science and math enjoyed however, the bulk of American university students continued to major in liberal arts areas like English, History, Political Science or Communication. What’s interesting is that the vast majority of liberal arts graduates, from the 1950’s forward, left college and began making a living at something that had little or nothing to do with what they studied in school. They became salesmen, merchants, public relations people, farmers, small business owners, tradespeople—or they left undergraduate life and enrolled in a professional school; they became doctors, lawyers, architects, teachers, nurses.
By the mid-1960’s, the one constant had become that if you wanted a salaried job, you needed a college degree. Didn’t matter much in most cases what the degree was in, but you had to have one.
What doesn’t so often get noticed when the history of education is discussed is that, starting even before WW II and continuing in even stronger fashion after it, there were very comfortable, middle class livings to be made that didn’t require anything beyond a secondary education—in some cases, not even that. America during that period was the manufacturing capital of the world, and, thanks largely to unions, hourly wages in most areas of manufacturing were more than adequate to support a family and even pop for an annual vacation.
The 1950’s, ‘60’s and ‘70’s were also boom times for all sorts of construction in this country—everything from roads and bridges to suburban housing. So if you didn’t go to college, and you didn’t fancy an assembly line, you apprenticed for a few years as a mason or a carpenter or a plumber or an electrician and still made a very comfortable living for yourself and your family.
What’s the point of all this nostalgia? Simply this. Times have changed, and many of the things that made the 20th century an “American Century” had, by the 1990’s, become bureaucratized, ossified, gentrified and more problem than solution. The great push for education that started in the ‘50’s led to bloated quasi-unions like the NEA and NTA, both of which seem more concerned that no teacher be fired than that no bad teacher be retained. It led to equally bloated Education Schools which gave theory and pedagogy greater import than knowledge of a subject and, partly to justify their existence with numbers, rapidly became populated by students who found majoring in math too difficult and so decided to learn to teach it. By the turn of the century, it was commonplace that the bottom third of each new freshman class gravitated heavily toward schools of Education.
Put simply, America is no longer the envy of the world so far as education is concerned and one result of that is that we are also no longer the envy of the world economically either. In my view, those two sad facts are related. A more or less recent phenomenon has to be added to the mix. Next year, if projections hold true, the total national debt on student loans will exceed 1 trillion dollars. That’s with a “T.” On average, a graduate of a four year school will owe in excess of $26,000. If you restrict that to graduates of “elite” schools, the number frequently reaches into 6 figures and the average is nearly $50,000.
What many young people—perhaps most—are discovering is that they can’t afford to buy a car, or a new washing machine or, God forbid, a house, because their montly student loan payment squeezes those kinds of things out of the budget. More to the point, they find that their English major really doesn’t make them all that attractive to the companies that are actually hiring today.
There are a lot of things that need to be done to fix the mess this country is in right now—most of them, unfortunately, requiring a degree of political will and sense of “country first” that just doesn’t exist.
I’d like to propose one set of changes that wouldn’t require a lot of money and might not even run into a lot of resistance—except from the higher education establishment. Here, in no particular order, are the changes. Note that these would apply only to public institutions of learning. The Harvards of the world could continue doing as they please.
1. Change the emphasis in four year undergraduate programs from liberal arts to math, engineering and science, particularly computer science. Make all the humanities (English, History, Religion, Political Science, etc) subjects that can constitute minors, not majors, and perhaps require every student to have two of them. Majors would have to be chosen from the sciences and math.
2. Extend government paid tuition to everyone with a minimum score of 24 on the ACT or 1300 on the SAT. Those are the folks that studies indicate most commonly do well in college and in fact graduate. Require re-payment of whatever funds a student got from the government if the student fails to graduate.
3. Do away with Education Schools and revise the minimum qualification for teaching in a public K-12 institution either to completion of a two year major in a humanities subject in a two year college, or completion of a degree from a four year college, plus a year paid internship in a public school. Require a teacher certification examination, similar to what nurses, accountants, etc., do now, at the end of the internship year.
4. Create, at federal expense, a minimum of two “trade schools” in every state, wth the actual number in each state proportional to the state’s population. These would need to be residence schools obviously. Students would transfer to such a school after completing their second year of secondary education and would spend their final two years there. The schools would offer students a variety of trades to specialize in and the school day would be organized the way it currently is in, for example, arts magnet schools. Students would spend the morning hours doing traditional secondary education subjects, and the afternoon learning their trade.
5. Make teacher retention in public K-12 schools a function of annual student/peer/administration review with peer review by itself given weight equal to that of student and administration review combined. Tenure would result from 10 consecutive years of positive reviews, but tenured faculty would be subject to quadrennial reviews that could lead to dismissal or revocation of tenure.
6. In public universities and colleges, faculty would become eligible for tenure after 6 years, but, upon receiving tenure, would be subject to quadrennial reviews that could lead to dismissal or revocation of tenure.
The most obvious effect of these proposals would be to substantially lower the number of students attending four year schools and substantially raise the number attending two year schools. As I said, high education wouldn’t like this. What it would accomplish however is a redirection of post-secondary education resources into those areas that are most likely to facilitate economic growth domestically and technological competitiveness globally.
It would also have the effect of significantly shrinking the student loan industry that has grown up, and more importantly, significantly reduce the number of graduates who can’t afford to become full-time consumers because they owe too much in student loans.
Just as importantly, it would make trained mechanics, machinists, dye workers, electricians and so forth once again available to American companies who have been complaining for years that they have jobs in those areas that they can’t find qualified people to fill.
And perhaps most important of all, revamping the way teachers are trained and retained would go a long way toward restoring America’s intellectual competitiveness in the global economy.
You know, until the middle of the 19th century or thereabouts, most of the world was agrarian and the education that was required to be successful was attuned to that reality. When industrialization occurred, education requirements changed, and for the most part, educational resources were re-directed accordingly. In the developed world at least, we are now moving beyond an industrial society to a science and technology economy, and it seems to me, education needs to once again change to accommodate the new reality.
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