Barry Stern’s column began this way: “Michigan’s high schools need a makeover. They bore too many students, frustrate too many teachers and are deemed irrelevant by too many employers.”
Well, there is a lot of truth in that. I see college students who seem to have had a nearly content-free high school education. My wife, who has been an advanced placement high school history teacher for many years, knows all about frustrations.
Yet much of what Barry Stern is proposing as a cure strikes me as being worse than the disease. Particularly troublesome is his idea that we ought to replace our elected school boards with industry-led boards.
He wants to then split high schools off from the rest of the school system and tie them to nearby community colleges and the local business community. What this would do, in other words, is largely hand out students’ fate over to local businessmen, who would presumably train the kind of workers they think they’ll need for the future.
Not only does that sound like some kind of totalitarian nightmare, our local business leaders haven’t exactly done a brilliant job at either predicting or preparing for the economies of the future.
Would Dearborn students, for example, be shaped by the geniuses at Ford who managed to lose $10 BILLION dollars last year?
I think it is safe to say that no business leader saw the personal computer revolution coming. Industry in this state has a track record that reminds me very much of the military-industrial complex.
We are always knocking ourselves out to prepare for the last war. Having said that, I think there’s a lot of good in Stern’s overall concept. Nor do I think he is being malevolent. He worked in the federal Department of Education under George W. Bush, a big believer in privatization, and has a career development background.
The fact is that we don’t do nearly enough to help train people for careers other than those who are plainly what we identify as conventional college material. The otherwise excellent Cherry report on higher education in Michigan was notoriously weak on this point.
Clearly it is not enough to just shunt the slow readers off to auto mechanics classes anymore. But neither should we attempt to fix a fourteen year old child’s future. At that age, without the slightest shred of athletic ability, I was still thinking shortstop.
In her state of the state speech, the governor proposed sending laid-off workers to community college to develop a new set of skills.
Having taught for years, I think that while we may tweak the way our high schools function, I would really like to see us reinvent education for those between ages 18 and 20. For some, this may be a time for intense vocational training. For others, two years of civilian or military national service might make sense. We need to worry about the future, But we need never to lose freedom of choice.
Barry Stern must've meant "trade schools" with all his criticism.
Posted by: jrthumbprints | August 28, 2007 at 11:45 PM