MaxedOutMama
Friday, December 24, 2004
Voices In Cyberspace
Aldon Hynes over at Orient Lodge is trying to do the bipartisan-connect-the-issues dialogue thing. He has some interesting thoughts. I think Aldon is one of those people who really knows how political parties work, (check out the post on Connecticut Democratic politics, for example), and I've been trying to follow him.
I really liked Crystal Clear's recent post on wasting time in public education. Crystal Clear is a single mother of two (she got pregnant by artificial insemination) and some sort of counselor, so she has a very different sort of perspective than mine. She was protesting a day spent on ToBGLAD, not because she thinks intolerance towards Gay, Bisexual, Lesbians and Transexuals is a good thing, but because of the time it diverts from what should be the basic focus of public schooling. The post I linked to is a follow-up and has one comment that I think particularly exemplifies the nature of the debate about public schools. In part, the commenter said:
"Again, school is about ways of thinking and not just textbooks. So what if my grammar isn't perfect? Aren't these things we can learn later on in life too? Where as, having an open-mind is somethign that must be taught early on. And I highly doubt there would've been nearly as many students at ToBGLAD if we had held it on a saturday."
Let me put it this way - if you can't write a decent college admissions essay, you won't be learning grammar in college. Linguistic patterns are often set quite early in life - your ability to learn languages tends to shut down by age 8 or so, while your brain is programmed to receive that kind of information in early childhood. And then you have to pay for college, but high school is free. The commenter's attitude might sound kind, but it operates to discriminate against those who start life with less advantages.
The commenter buys the idea that the function of the public schools is essentially propaganda, rather than core education - but tolerance can be taught as a basic principle, and doesn't have to be taught group by group. What these high school students are apparently being taught is tolerance for particular groups, rather than the basic principles of tolerance - and that is fatal, IMO. And no, Aldon, the barrier to developing scientists and engineering students is not that such careers are not considered cool. The barrier is that many students are simply not prepared mentally or emotionally to study that hard and deal with the math.
Also, I have to say that while students from more privileged backgrounds may be able to afford the time for this sort of activity, there are many students who need every minute of basic academic instruction they can get in order to have the chance to get ahead in life. Students in what should be some very good schools are getting a much poorer basic education than they did when I was in high school (that was shortly after we killed off the last of the T. Rexes - we were very environmentally insensitive then), and so many "college" level courses now are what we used to take in high school. This is not a good situation, and it is highly discriminatory against lower-income, impoverished minorities, and first-generation immigrants.
My father was born in 1929 to German refugees who had just arrived in this country. Neither of his parents spoke English well when he was a young child, although they tried. He went to elementary school in the depths of the Great Depression, attending an impoverished NY rural district which was mostly first and second generation immigrants, many of whom wore rags to school. A few of the families were literally living in shacks made from metal and boards scavenged from the town dump. Yet my father and his brother and sister received a superb education and graduated from high school speaking and writing excellent, grammatical English. Both my father and his brother went on to attend college and became engineers.
Such an outcome is literally not even a possibility for the product of such a school system today, and no blather about socio-economic barriers, English as a second language and poor parenting explains the discrepancy between public schooling then and now. My father's mother was the only one who could find work (12 hours a day cleaning), so as babies they were left to the care of my grandfather, a man who literally barely spoke. He fed them and changed diapers, but that was about all the interaction they got. Those three children had what would be considered a terrible early childhood by today's standards. But they did go to a school that concentrated on education and imposed high educational standards. The difference is, quite simply, that the basic academic curriculum and standards of discipline in public schools have been watered down to an astonishing extent.
Oh, and by the way, my father turned out to be an incredibly compassionate, kind person. My father has been dead for well over a decade now, but his intellect, kindness and compassion resounds in my memory. He was incredibly sympathetic to those suffering in any way (as you might expect from his background), intensely interested in science and the world around him, and utterly unprejudiced.
There is an undercurrent of belief in many "liberal" circles today that much of the difference is genetic propensity. Nothing, in my experience, could be further from the truth. I have taken minority graduates from urban high schools and trained them in computer programming concepts and specific programming languages; several of these people had very poor language and math skills due to bad educations. The ability to think abstractly was there, but the basic education was lacking. Nonetheless, they learned well - in fact, I had better luck with them than with several Caucasion graduates from some of the best universities in the nation. The difference was that my losers were willing to work harder, so they became winners.
I found out later that the personnel officer at that company, who was black, was deliberately directing minority candidates to me because of my record in advancing them. I also found out after I left the company that there had been considerable resentment in some quarters because I was believed to be a flaming leftist due to my promotion of my loser-winners above, for instance, a white Bennington graduate. Well guess what, my black high school graduates were racking their brains to comprehend, and performed better. A computer is a completely color-blind entity that neither knows or cares about whether you have a prestigious degree.
The crappy educations my loser-winners had received were obviously not their fault, nor were their academic deficiencies a reflection of their unwillingness to learn. They had attended poor public school systems, and that was the only reason they were disadvantaged. No amount of earnest rhetoric about tolerance and the evil of prejudice could avert the real consequences in their lives. The Bennington graduate was always going to be able to do better in interviews and in any job that required the ability to write and speak well.
The problem is that opportunities such as the ones I had to offer (the company was a publishing company, and didn't hire high-priced outside talent) are few and far between. Much of the average child's destiny is set by the type of elementary education he or she receives. We have been shortchanging a lot of kids in that area ever since the 70's, and I think it is greatly impairing the ability of those from disadvantaged backgrounds to move ahead in our society. The law of life is use it or lose it. If you don't exercise your body when you are young, you will not grow up to be as strong and flexible as you could have been, and if you don't exercise your brain when you are young, you will not grow up to be as adept at problem-solving as you could have been. You can compensate later for your lack of early development, but the realities of life dictate that it gets harder and harder.
Crystal is utterly right when she comments that the most discrimination an average adult experiences is based on their ability to speak and interact with other people, and that the average business owner cares far more about an employee's ability to produce than the details of the employee's private life. I would add that the more technical professions are the least subject to discriminatory practices, because you are judged on your ability to produce - a completely objective standard. It is no accident that a lot of people with disabilities and disadvantages of different kinds turn to technical professions such as computer programming.
I really liked Crystal Clear's recent post on wasting time in public education. Crystal Clear is a single mother of two (she got pregnant by artificial insemination) and some sort of counselor, so she has a very different sort of perspective than mine. She was protesting a day spent on ToBGLAD, not because she thinks intolerance towards Gay, Bisexual, Lesbians and Transexuals is a good thing, but because of the time it diverts from what should be the basic focus of public schooling. The post I linked to is a follow-up and has one comment that I think particularly exemplifies the nature of the debate about public schools. In part, the commenter said:
"Again, school is about ways of thinking and not just textbooks. So what if my grammar isn't perfect? Aren't these things we can learn later on in life too? Where as, having an open-mind is somethign that must be taught early on. And I highly doubt there would've been nearly as many students at ToBGLAD if we had held it on a saturday."
Let me put it this way - if you can't write a decent college admissions essay, you won't be learning grammar in college. Linguistic patterns are often set quite early in life - your ability to learn languages tends to shut down by age 8 or so, while your brain is programmed to receive that kind of information in early childhood. And then you have to pay for college, but high school is free. The commenter's attitude might sound kind, but it operates to discriminate against those who start life with less advantages.
The commenter buys the idea that the function of the public schools is essentially propaganda, rather than core education - but tolerance can be taught as a basic principle, and doesn't have to be taught group by group. What these high school students are apparently being taught is tolerance for particular groups, rather than the basic principles of tolerance - and that is fatal, IMO. And no, Aldon, the barrier to developing scientists and engineering students is not that such careers are not considered cool. The barrier is that many students are simply not prepared mentally or emotionally to study that hard and deal with the math.
Also, I have to say that while students from more privileged backgrounds may be able to afford the time for this sort of activity, there are many students who need every minute of basic academic instruction they can get in order to have the chance to get ahead in life. Students in what should be some very good schools are getting a much poorer basic education than they did when I was in high school (that was shortly after we killed off the last of the T. Rexes - we were very environmentally insensitive then), and so many "college" level courses now are what we used to take in high school. This is not a good situation, and it is highly discriminatory against lower-income, impoverished minorities, and first-generation immigrants.
My father was born in 1929 to German refugees who had just arrived in this country. Neither of his parents spoke English well when he was a young child, although they tried. He went to elementary school in the depths of the Great Depression, attending an impoverished NY rural district which was mostly first and second generation immigrants, many of whom wore rags to school. A few of the families were literally living in shacks made from metal and boards scavenged from the town dump. Yet my father and his brother and sister received a superb education and graduated from high school speaking and writing excellent, grammatical English. Both my father and his brother went on to attend college and became engineers.
Such an outcome is literally not even a possibility for the product of such a school system today, and no blather about socio-economic barriers, English as a second language and poor parenting explains the discrepancy between public schooling then and now. My father's mother was the only one who could find work (12 hours a day cleaning), so as babies they were left to the care of my grandfather, a man who literally barely spoke. He fed them and changed diapers, but that was about all the interaction they got. Those three children had what would be considered a terrible early childhood by today's standards. But they did go to a school that concentrated on education and imposed high educational standards. The difference is, quite simply, that the basic academic curriculum and standards of discipline in public schools have been watered down to an astonishing extent.
Oh, and by the way, my father turned out to be an incredibly compassionate, kind person. My father has been dead for well over a decade now, but his intellect, kindness and compassion resounds in my memory. He was incredibly sympathetic to those suffering in any way (as you might expect from his background), intensely interested in science and the world around him, and utterly unprejudiced.
There is an undercurrent of belief in many "liberal" circles today that much of the difference is genetic propensity. Nothing, in my experience, could be further from the truth. I have taken minority graduates from urban high schools and trained them in computer programming concepts and specific programming languages; several of these people had very poor language and math skills due to bad educations. The ability to think abstractly was there, but the basic education was lacking. Nonetheless, they learned well - in fact, I had better luck with them than with several Caucasion graduates from some of the best universities in the nation. The difference was that my losers were willing to work harder, so they became winners.
I found out later that the personnel officer at that company, who was black, was deliberately directing minority candidates to me because of my record in advancing them. I also found out after I left the company that there had been considerable resentment in some quarters because I was believed to be a flaming leftist due to my promotion of my loser-winners above, for instance, a white Bennington graduate. Well guess what, my black high school graduates were racking their brains to comprehend, and performed better. A computer is a completely color-blind entity that neither knows or cares about whether you have a prestigious degree.
The crappy educations my loser-winners had received were obviously not their fault, nor were their academic deficiencies a reflection of their unwillingness to learn. They had attended poor public school systems, and that was the only reason they were disadvantaged. No amount of earnest rhetoric about tolerance and the evil of prejudice could avert the real consequences in their lives. The Bennington graduate was always going to be able to do better in interviews and in any job that required the ability to write and speak well.
The problem is that opportunities such as the ones I had to offer (the company was a publishing company, and didn't hire high-priced outside talent) are few and far between. Much of the average child's destiny is set by the type of elementary education he or she receives. We have been shortchanging a lot of kids in that area ever since the 70's, and I think it is greatly impairing the ability of those from disadvantaged backgrounds to move ahead in our society. The law of life is use it or lose it. If you don't exercise your body when you are young, you will not grow up to be as strong and flexible as you could have been, and if you don't exercise your brain when you are young, you will not grow up to be as adept at problem-solving as you could have been. You can compensate later for your lack of early development, but the realities of life dictate that it gets harder and harder.
Crystal is utterly right when she comments that the most discrimination an average adult experiences is based on their ability to speak and interact with other people, and that the average business owner cares far more about an employee's ability to produce than the details of the employee's private life. I would add that the more technical professions are the least subject to discriminatory practices, because you are judged on your ability to produce - a completely objective standard. It is no accident that a lot of people with disabilities and disadvantages of different kinds turn to technical professions such as computer programming.
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I think you're making Bill Cosby's point, too. Adults, preferably parents, have to guide children and give them a sense of direction. They have to be taught the value of knowledge, and they have to learn to participate in society, to include learning how to speak and write. Nature no doubt has an influence, but there's not substitute for positive nurture.
Thank you so very much for your comment and link back. I greatly appreciate you continuing this discussion and thought. Your blog ROCKS.... Very very impressive. Honored I wrote something that you expanded upon so thoughtfully.
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