The Educational Industrial Complex
President Eisenhower famously warned us about the dangers of the Military industrial Complex. Prior to that, General Smedley Butler opined a similar warning, as well as numerous others.
Is there any similar eerie toll currently forewarning us all to the malignant injection of capitalism which is building leviathan like crisis to our education system to a level from which we may not be able to recover.
While this burgeoning national apocalypse looms, far too many of us reflexively knee-jerk our selves right back into our self incarcerating political boxes where we are easily managed and led by As Yeats called them “The worst (who) are full of passionate intensity."
Capitalism should only play the most miniscule part in the education of our young people. However as it stands currently, there seems to be more concern for the money students bring in than cultivating their young minds.
This problem should galvanize the nation into a NASA like focus. Instead, we’re so myopic in our public vision and so off-base in what our goals are, we actually aid the problem.
The “right-wingers” say, we have too many unqualified students going to our universities. We have too many loan programs, guarantees and the like.
The “left-wingers” say there too many unnecessary burdens getting into college, with biased testing and the like. In addition, the high debt load is a crushingly heavy burden on those who graduate.
Both sides only slightly touch the correct point, before wandering off onto the political killing fields of modern day arguments.
The real point is that WE NEED either nearly every young person to attend some sort of higher education or WE NEED the current K-12 system to be so rigorous that upon leaving our young people have REAL WORLD skills.
There is no financial argument here. . . It simply has got to be done or we as a top tier nation-state are finished.
The real enemy is in the gates, it is the education system itself. School systems at every level from pre-K on to post grad., see the constant bickering over “why Johnny can’t read,” or “why Jane needs an image empowering culture,” or “why jimmy’s test are biased,” or “why Joe can’t get to the next level,” and the schools say, “more money will fix that.”
At the lower grades, the schools plead for more money through millage rates and the governmental purse strings. In many cases the public is balking, and more and more schools are cutting corners, cutting classes and/or simply falling apart.
At the upper educational levels, our better colleges and universities are both tugging at the governmental purse strings along with raising tuitions and fees on the students.
Our worst colleges, just use students who are totally unready for any sort of college lovel work, as human biggie banks. aided, of course, by those ever present government purse strings.
It is a first class racket, and it is bringing a great nation down, we now, are only seeing the tip of this titanic killing iceberg.
The vociferous urgent demand for foreign brainpower, through various visas, should be a clarion call that we need to start supplying HOMEGROWN intellect, but instead we argue over the number of H1-B visas we should let in.
When the universities call for more math and science high-schoolers, the state and local education leaders argue whether or not kids learn better with I-pads, or if we should even grade them anymore.
When we call on the universities to supply more brainpower, they set up shop in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.
To have an M.I.T in Singapore or an American University in Dubai, U.A.E., is an oxymoron to the utmost, it is an impossibility.
It exists in name only and it’s only purpose is MONEY.
Begrudge no child an education, no matter where they were born or where they live.
However, that very purpose for which our education was built, which was the envy of the world, is being supplanted by global quest to seek ever new sources of capital.
We somehow, have managed to get to the point where we seemingly have a new primary school district every 50 feet, encrusted with layers upon layers of bureaucrats and administrators, yet don’t educate our children any better than we did a half century ago.
By the way, we spend over 30 times more on those poor students than we did in the 1950’s.
Moreover, while we graduate more college students than we did 50 years ago, many of these graduates are not skilled in the areas of urgent and future need, according to numerous studies.
The education system is a beast that must be starved, strangled and stripped of everything but teachers, students and chalkboards !!! Then maybe, the education process can be reborn
Arguably there should be a free route to any citizen no matter their age to attend our state universities. If the private schools want to charge, so be it, that is capitalism as it should be.
With this move, instead of the barriers to higher education being one’s ability to pay, it SHOULD and MUST return to the rigorous high academic standards.
State schools, should be just that, STATE schools. there should be NO Georgia Tech, in Paris, NO Univ. of Texas in Saudi Arabia. Get back to educating and stop the money grabbing. From post-grad work, going all the way down to the pre-schools, academics must again take precedence.
There should be NO remedial classes in our colleges; again, this was done to keep students who weren’t ready to do the college level work AND RETAIN THEIR RICHES. Ideally k-12 grades should do all the prep work necessary for college level courses, but if not, that's where community colleges can fill the gap.
Those should be our arguments and debates.
When China is cranking out more engineers than we have STUDENTS in TOTAL, (((India ain’t far behind))) it is time for America to get back to “fightin’ weight.”
For us to constantly argue the political angles while overlooking the fact that we face a national crisis is cowardly defeatism masked as political rhetoric because we know what’s needed yet we continue to opine our comfortable arguments that advance little to nothing at all.
All of our banal clattering is unworthy of what we deem as civic responsibilities. In the end will allow the world to pass us by and leave us on the scrapheap of history.
Is there any similar eerie toll currently forewarning us all to the malignant injection of capitalism which is building leviathan like crisis to our education system to a level from which we may not be able to recover.
While this burgeoning national apocalypse looms, far too many of us reflexively knee-jerk our selves right back into our self incarcerating political boxes where we are easily managed and led by As Yeats called them “The worst (who) are full of passionate intensity."
Capitalism should only play the most miniscule part in the education of our young people. However as it stands currently, there seems to be more concern for the money students bring in than cultivating their young minds.
This problem should galvanize the nation into a NASA like focus. Instead, we’re so myopic in our public vision and so off-base in what our goals are, we actually aid the problem.
The “right-wingers” say, we have too many unqualified students going to our universities. We have too many loan programs, guarantees and the like.
The “left-wingers” say there too many unnecessary burdens getting into college, with biased testing and the like. In addition, the high debt load is a crushingly heavy burden on those who graduate.
Both sides only slightly touch the correct point, before wandering off onto the political killing fields of modern day arguments.
The real point is that WE NEED either nearly every young person to attend some sort of higher education or WE NEED the current K-12 system to be so rigorous that upon leaving our young people have REAL WORLD skills.
There is no financial argument here. . . It simply has got to be done or we as a top tier nation-state are finished.
The real enemy is in the gates, it is the education system itself. School systems at every level from pre-K on to post grad., see the constant bickering over “why Johnny can’t read,” or “why Jane needs an image empowering culture,” or “why jimmy’s test are biased,” or “why Joe can’t get to the next level,” and the schools say, “more money will fix that.”
At the lower grades, the schools plead for more money through millage rates and the governmental purse strings. In many cases the public is balking, and more and more schools are cutting corners, cutting classes and/or simply falling apart.
At the upper educational levels, our better colleges and universities are both tugging at the governmental purse strings along with raising tuitions and fees on the students.
Our worst colleges, just use students who are totally unready for any sort of college lovel work, as human biggie banks. aided, of course, by those ever present government purse strings.
It is a first class racket, and it is bringing a great nation down, we now, are only seeing the tip of this titanic killing iceberg.
When the universities call for more math and science high-schoolers, the state and local education leaders argue whether or not kids learn better with I-pads, or if we should even grade them anymore.
When we call on the universities to supply more brainpower, they set up shop in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.
To have an M.I.T in Singapore or an American University in Dubai, U.A.E., is an oxymoron to the utmost, it is an impossibility.
It exists in name only and it’s only purpose is MONEY.
Begrudge no child an education, no matter where they were born or where they live.
However, that very purpose for which our education was built, which was the envy of the world, is being supplanted by global quest to seek ever new sources of capital.
We somehow, have managed to get to the point where we seemingly have a new primary school district every 50 feet, encrusted with layers upon layers of bureaucrats and administrators, yet don’t educate our children any better than we did a half century ago.
By the way, we spend over 30 times more on those poor students than we did in the 1950’s.
Moreover, while we graduate more college students than we did 50 years ago, many of these graduates are not skilled in the areas of urgent and future need, according to numerous studies.
The education system is a beast that must be starved, strangled and stripped of everything but teachers, students and chalkboards !!! Then maybe, the education process can be reborn
Arguably there should be a free route to any citizen no matter their age to attend our state universities. If the private schools want to charge, so be it, that is capitalism as it should be.
With this move, instead of the barriers to higher education being one’s ability to pay, it SHOULD and MUST return to the rigorous high academic standards.
State schools, should be just that, STATE schools. there should be NO Georgia Tech, in Paris, NO Univ. of Texas in Saudi Arabia. Get back to educating and stop the money grabbing. From post-grad work, going all the way down to the pre-schools, academics must again take precedence.
There should be NO remedial classes in our colleges; again, this was done to keep students who weren’t ready to do the college level work AND RETAIN THEIR RICHES. Ideally k-12 grades should do all the prep work necessary for college level courses, but if not, that's where community colleges can fill the gap.
Those should be our arguments and debates.
When China is cranking out more engineers than we have STUDENTS in TOTAL, (((India ain’t far behind))) it is time for America to get back to “fightin’ weight.”
For us to constantly argue the political angles while overlooking the fact that we face a national crisis is cowardly defeatism masked as political rhetoric because we know what’s needed yet we continue to opine our comfortable arguments that advance little to nothing at all.
All of our banal clattering is unworthy of what we deem as civic responsibilities. In the end will allow the world to pass us by and leave us on the scrapheap of history.
No comments:
Post a Comment