Education / Youth – Page 60

Battle for the Soul of Higher Education

In this morning’s New York Times, Frank Bruni has a must-read column on the purposes of higher education. He focuses upon a debate currently consuming Texas, but anyone who has listened to the rhetoric coming from the Indiana General Assembly will recognize it as an issue equally salient in Indiana.

As Bruni poses the central question:”Do we want our marquee state universities to behave more like job-training centers, judged by the number of students they speed toward degrees, the percentage of those students who quickly land good-paying jobs and the thrift with which all of this is accomplished? In the service of that, are we willing to jeopardize some of the trailblazing research these schools have routinely done and the standards they’ve maintained?”

I would suggest an even more basic question: are we willing to value education? Do our lawmakers even recognize that education is not the same thing as job training? Do they see any value in the liberal arts, or in research that adds to the sum of human understanding and knowledge? Evidently not.

Bruni quotes the new Governor of Virginia on the subject: “Pat McCrory, the new governor of North Carolina, recently advocated legislation to distribute funds to the state’s colleges based not on their enrollments — or, as he said on a radio show, on “butts in seats” — but instead on “how many of those butts can get jobs. If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school,” he added. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

The current emphasis on what we used to call “vocational education” not only minimizes the value of education itself, it ignores the reality of today’s job market. Most college graduates will have several careers–not just jobs, but careers–and a significant number of those have yet to be invented. Students who emerge with “training” rather than an education that prepares them to think, to apply critical analytic skills to a rapidly changing economy and world, will soon need re-training.

Students who have been taught to think only instrumentally–who value only instruction that is immediately applicable economically, who are satisfied with the “how” and never ask “why”–are already at a considerable disadvantage. We have plenty of those students now, and I often want to invert the dismissive and ignorant statement made by Virginia’s Governor, and tell them: If you just want to learn how to manufacture widgets or push paper, fine.

Go to a trade school.

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The Best Definition I’ve Heard

I’m still at the Conference on Citizenship at Wayne State University. Today, in one of the panels, I heard something that really struck me: a definition of a good education.

A good education is learning that has the cumulative effect of increasing the capacity of each citizen to control his/her fate.

I like this definition, because self-determination is at the core of the American ideal. But self-determination requires knowledge and skills that equip individuals to control their own lives and pursue their own dreams. We hear a lot about improving education, about test results and teaching methods; we hear a lot less about the content of that education. Other than STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), we spend very little time considering the skills and knowledge we should be providing the nation’s schoolchildren.

Controlling one’s fate includes the ability to participate in democratic self-government. There is a lot of research that connects civic engagement with efficacy–confidence in ones ability to navigate the social and political environment. Powerless people don’t engage.

Of course, there are different kinds of powerlessness. There’s the kind we can address through education, by giving students the skills and information they need in order to participate in self-government. There’s also the powerlessness that we all face when the system becomes corrupted; when government and those in positions of power only respond to the privileged and affluent. But that’s a subject for a different blog.

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Send Money

I’m turning this morning’s post over to a government teacher at Cathedral High School, who is trying to raise money for her students to travel to Washington, D.C. to compete in the national We The People contest.

My name is Jill Baisinger; I am the coach of Cathedral High School’s We the People team. My class is trying to fund raise our trip to Washington D.C. for the We the People National Competition. Below is some information regarding the program and our school’s involvement.

We the People is a national civic education program that is taught in 5th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade classrooms. Its purpose is to help prepare students to become more active citizens. Students specialize in an area of constitutional studies from founding philosophies, historical application, civil rights, civil liberties, or current applications. The culminating activity is a competition set up as a Congressional hearing where students take and defend their constitutional view as they have a conversation with attorneys, judges, historians, and other members of the community.

This is only Cathedral’s second year to have a We the People program, yet the team this year won their Congressional district competition and the Indiana State competition, which is one of the three hardest competitions in the country. Cathedral is now “Team Indiana” – and will represent Indiana at the National hearings at the end of April in Washington D.C.

In the past, when We the People was fully funded through a Congressional earmark, the Indiana Bar Foundation was able to pick up the cost of the team to travel to D.C. and compete. During these economic hard times, this is no longer the case; now the team must raise $33,000 to get to the national competition. Students, parents, and Cathedral High School are working hard to make this come true – and this is what the money would go toward – getting the team to D.C. to compete against the best We the People teams across the country.

The students and I would be more than happy to do a 15 minute demonstration for you, to introduce you to the program. Or I would be more than willing to meet you to chat about the benefits of the program myself – Just let me know! Here is the website for our group – that gives a little more information about the program, history at Cathedral, and the team’s achievements in a short period of time. www.gocathedral.com/wethepeople ;

If you are interested in more information on ways to make a tax-deductible contribution to Cathedral’s “We the People…” team, please contact Cathedral’s Development Officer, Michelle Rhodes at (317) 968 – 7311 ormrhodes@gocathedral.com.

The decision to de-fund We The People has to rank as one of the stupidest, “penny-wise, pound foolish” decisions by a Congress that seems to wallow in stupidity. The program is one of the very few that has consistently been demonstrated to be effective in imparting basic civic understanding. As someone who has been a judge for the state contest, I can personally attest to the depth of historical and constitutional knowledge the students display. And unlike contests like “brain game,” all of the students in a given class participate–the extent of that participation is one of the criteria for which points are awarded. A couple of bright kids can’t “carry” the others.

I know young people for whom participation in We The People was a turning point, an experience that engaged them in active citizenship for years afterward. Competing at the national level can only intensify that experience.

I’m going to send a contribution to Cathedral; I hope many of you reading this will choose to do likewise.

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A Reform Worth Considering

I have long believed that America’s patchwork, complicated method of financing higher education makes no sense. I watch working students taking one more class than they can really manage in order to meet aid eligibility requirements; I see the university employing dozens of people to shuffle the paperwork; I see parents struggling to complete complex forms–and of course, we’ve all seen the reports of unmanageable student loan debt. The need to repay that debt constrains the choices of graduates who might go into lower-paying but more satisfying jobs, makes periods of unemployment more terrifying, and probably restrains the sort of consumer spending that would boost economic growth.

An article in the recent issue of the Atlantic suggests scrapping the whole system and replacing it with a far simpler, more transparent approach. I hope a couple of paragraphs from that article will tempt you to click through and read the whole thing.

With what the federal government spent on its various and sundry student aid initiatives last year, it could have covered the tuition bill of every student at every public college in the country. Doing so might have required cutting off financial aid at Yale, Amherst, the University of Phoenix, and every other private university. But at this point, that might be a trade worth considering.

….

The under-funding of public university systems and Washington’s attempts to compensate have also helped nourish a giant barnacle on the side of higher-ed: the for-profit college industry. As scarce classroom space at community and open-admission state colleges has filled up, students turned towards alternatives like Kaplan University and University of Phoenix, which charge tens of thousands of dollars for degrees with dubious job market value. They get away with it because of federal aid. I call it the 10, 25, 50 problem: They educate ten percent of students, who take out about a quarter of all student loans and are responsible for about half of all defaults. In the meantime, they suck up about $8.8 billion, or around 25 percent, of all Pell Grant money.

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Raising Cyber-Citizens

Some intriguing research on civic education is being conducted by Professor Joseph Kahne, the John and Martha Davidson Professor of Education at Mills College in California. Kahne is investigating the effect of digital media on young people’s political knowledge and engagement, and his preliminary findings (let’s face it, at this stage of our ‘cyber-world,’ everything we know is preliminary) are pretty fascinating.

Kahne says that half of all 18-20-year-olds say their voting decisions are influenced by what they learn online.

Seventy-five percent of America’s youth are active on Facebook; and ninety-five percent of teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 use the Internet. Almost a quarter of all smartphones are used by teens and young adults between 13 and 24.

Youth under twenty-five are more often recruited for civic or political activities online than through other methods.

Before you wring your hands and–in the manner of all passing generations–denounce this state of affairs as the harbinger of a disconnected, disinterested polity, consider some of Kahne’s other findings: even controlling for prior levels of engagement, when young people became highly involved in online, interest-driven communities (Harry Potter fans, sports fans, followers of particular music genres, etc.), they became more likely to volunteer in their communities, raise money for a charitable cause, or work together with others to solve a community problem. These groups are also less likely to serve as “echo chambers” and more likely to introduce young people to social and political perspectives other than their own than their off-line lives in communities of like-minded residents. Even when the online communities discuss sports or hobbies, political matters emerge and are discussed–and Hobbit aficionados are not likely to be politically homogeneous.

Kahne has even collaborated with Pew’s Internet and American Life Project to explore the ways in which video games can be used to provide youth with civic learning experiences, and he cites Games for Change, an organization working to exploit that possibility.

Cyberspace certainly presents parents and educators with new challenges–some of them worthy of our concern. But like all change, it also opens up new opportunities. The Internet is a tool, and like all tools, morally and educationally neutral. It’s how we use it that makes the difference.