busyReport Says Education Gaps Create "Permanent Recession"
Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, The Christian Science Monitor: "Educational achievement gaps are typically measured in terms of test scores - across lines of race and income, or even across state and national borders. But what if they were measured in dollars?"
One way to improve matters would be to narrow or close the gaps in education. Another would be to put some serious effort into matching people's interests and abilities to suitable careers. Right now, we are wasting a tremendous amount of human potential; we should not be doing that.
Why do you need an education to work a McJob?
April 24 2009, 15:23:42 UTC 12 years ago
I have been complaining for years about the "dumbing down" of Americans via our school systems. Your basic public school has been pandering to the lowest common denominator since I was in school (Arizona's awful). I went from "gifted programs" to nothing in the space of three years, because no one wanted to hurt the feelings of the less academically endowed anymore. I had classmates who couldn't read being graduated with the rest of us.
I put my children in a lot of extra community learning activities because the dumbing down had gotten much worse by the time they were school age. Advanced education wasn't available in 4/5 schools my daughters attended. In the few that had programs, the activities were more likely to be "Toastmasters" and that ilk. Had I been able to put her in a private school, I would have.
My oldest has 160+ i.q. and is, by nature, evil*. Toastmasters does not have the means to handle the bizarrely intelligent. It took all I had as a parent to feed that voracious desire for knowledge and to teach her to use her powers for good. The schools were very little help. She ended up a 16 yr old drop out, got her GED, and her first college degree by 18. I can only imagine her fate without the extra education options I provided.
*This is a joke, kind of. She may not actually be evil. We're not sure. She's very good to animals.
Re: Why do you need an education to work a McJob?
April 24 2009, 17:34:30 UTC 12 years ago
So have I. It was bad before; it's disastrous now. I found that school got in the way of my education far more often than it helped. The only two exceptions are math, which I would never have studied willingly but was not worth the amount of harangue that came with it; and typing, which I loathed but pursued because I knew I'd need it. Everything else, give me a book and some gear and access to an expert if I need it, and get out of my way.
>>She may not actually be evil. We're not sure.<<
Perhaps wicked, mischievous, or devious would suit better. Or perhaps her ethics haven't finished growing in yet.
Or perhaps her ethics haven't finished growing in yet.
April 24 2009, 23:36:19 UTC 12 years ago
Learn to read and learn to learn
April 24 2009, 23:47:13 UTC 12 years ago
Back to the point. It was truly in college that I learned HOW to develop my mind. Luckily, I was able to pass that along to my daughters as they grew up. I was seventeen and twenty when they were born. Thanks to college, I knew how to learn.
I skated through high school a very big fish in a very small pond and was left to my own devices for most of those years. With no "gifted program", they didn't know what to do with me. I had a bunch of "free class" hours*, something they made up for about seven of us. Luckily, I had a library available to me and my mother taught me to be a reader.
*Obviously, I didn't have enough supervision.