Classics in school and education in general

[vison]

You're right, but.

Your minds weren't engaged with social media 24/7.

I, of course, had to spend 18 hours a day polishing the dinosaur's harness, and cleaning out his pen while dad rode him to work and before I walked to school barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways.

[Nin]

Well, when I was a teen. although there were no cell phones yet, there was already a lot of discussion about polution and environment, in my city unemployment reached 20% and AIDS already existed...

The kids today may have a lot of things from the material point of view, but they grow up in a world where they are absolutely not sure that their lifes will or can be as good as the ones of their parents and grand-parents. And as a background, that is tough.

Vison, I don't know about Tay. But I see that some of the kids first when they start using social media are nuts about it and then after a few months (the longest would be six months of several daily status change etc.), it all equals out. My step-daughter chatted for hours when I arrived here (she was 15 then), now she can spend days without using MSN once (she is 19 now). Think of what you did with your time before messageboards like this one... your social life has changed too in the last ten years and so has the life of our children (digital natives, they call them, I have heard).

[vison]

Very true, Nin. I live in hope!

[Maria]

vison, he sounds like a great kid. (Does his OWN LAUNDRY! )

I made my kids do their own laundry starting at 9 years old. What's so strange about a teenager doing it?

[yovargas]

Some teenagers are known to be, ahem, resistant to such things. (Sorry, mom!! )

[Inanna]

Some teenagers are known to be, ahem, resistant to such things. (Sorry, mom!! )

Very sorry Mom!

[Primula Baggins]

They resist less when parents don't ever cave and do the laundry for them. Mandatory team uniforms that must be clean for games do help, during the grade-school/middle-school soccer and baseball phase; if not for that, some kids would wear dirty jeans until the knees wouldn't bend any more.

My kids were all told they had to do their own laundry when they reached age 10. It's more or less worked; I'm not above reminding them to do it, and I've been known to move a load along after they've gone to bed, but that's the extent of my mercy. After my oldest arrived at college, he told me he was proud that he'd been able to teach several of his dorm-mates how to do their laundry.

[vison]

It's not like he has to go to the river and beat his clothes on flat rocks! The laundry room is the room next to his, so he only has to carry the stuff about 10 feet. Actually, he can kick it along the floor . . .

He's so flippin' fussy about his clothes and since he has to have clean from the skin out every single morning, he does a lot of laundry. Only, he doesn't fold it. That bugs me, but I leave it be.

I am a folder. I like folding clean clothes.

So Oz didn't have a fun Halloween. He had 2 chums stay over Saturday night and I was under the impression that they were staying until after Trick or Treat last night, but they were gone by 4 pm. Oz wanted to go to his Dad's but I wasn't feeling terribly well and was awfully tired, so we stayed home. He watched horror movies on TV while LM and I watched the horror of a movie known as Hidalgo.

Yes, Anthriel, the horse(s) was/were cute. But they didn't do a very good job of matching the markings on the faces. Minor detail and actually didn't irritate me that much but was just part of the worst horse movie I've ever seen. It made "Fury" look like Shakespeare.

My favourite movie horse was the one Lee Marvin had in Cat Ballou. Oh, and The Black.

Holy cats. I see I have mixed threads.

Oh, well.

Worse things happen at sea.

[Primula Baggins]

Was Lee Marvin's horse the one that got drunk? I haven't seen Cat Ballou in about thirty years, but it's a favorite of my dad's, so when it was on, we watched it.

[Maria]

My kids didn't even consider laundry skills worth mentioning when they went to college. When they moved off campus, however, all three of them were appalled by how little their roommates knew of cooking.

Not teaching your kids basic cooking skills is just plain cruel, in my opinion. They'll be doomed to have others cook for them forever in one form or another. And in my younger daughter's case, what she knew about cooking provided her with the basic knowledge to seek a food oriented career. She hated the business major she started out with in college, but almost once a week she calls me and says how much she love the "Food Science" major she's switched to now.

Last week's call was to enthuse about how her class spent an entire hour going over exactly how chocolate improves one's sex life! They went through all the biochemical processes that go on in the brain with the ingestion of chocolate and how that affects the body and a lot about chocolate itself and how it's processed and used.

If she hadn't liked cooking enough to start considering a career as a chef, she'd have never found this major to try- where her love of cooking and chemistry comes together like this.

[vison]

Was Lee Marvin's horse the one that got drunk? I haven't seen Cat Ballou in about thirty years, but it's a favorite of my dad's, so when it was on, we watched it.

Yes.

[Dave_LF]

I don’t agree with point 2, but I think that everything else is spot-on.

I'm late, but that guy sounds like he's got it about right to me too. Part of the problem is just how much time it takes to train for a professional career now versus a century ago. It used to be quite practical to spend (say) half your time studying a specific field, and the other half on general education. They keep making more material to learn, but no one's making more time.

[Túrin Turambar]

As part of the Government's campaign for the upcoming state election, Victorian Premier John Brumby has announced that he will put 200 million dollars towards a new 'year 9 experience'. It will take students away from the classroom for one term, centre around a two-week camp, and is designed to teach essential life skills such as financial literacy, bushfire awareness, survival skills, drug and alcohol awareness, and the like (see the linked PDF for details).

I have to admit that, at first glance, this seems totally awesome. It has been extremely common for human socities to have some sort of initiation for young people, particularly young men, involving travelling into the wilderness. Australian aboriginies had (and still have) many such rituals. And Year 9, when students are in the 13-15 age range, seems like the ideal time to hit them with it. And a number of private schools in that state already do something like this. It is expensive, though, and I have to wonder whether the bulk of the program wouldn't be better spread throughout the entire school year (or even the two years of junior high, 9 and 10). Still, I can't wait to see how this works if it gets up.

[Dave_LF]

I would have loved to do something like that as a kid, though I wouldn't have been ready at 13-15. But maybe the whole point is to do it before you think you're ready.

[Primula Baggins]

That's an age of a lot of important transitions, Dave. I think it's great to have social rituals around them.

And we have had them, certainly: bar and bat mitzvah at 13, and confirmation in Christian denominations at about the same age (or baptism, for churches that don't baptize infants); moving from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts, in which the boys cross a bridge and are acknowledged as assuming autonomy; entering high school. But there should be more.

[Maria]

I participated in the Youth Conservation Corps when I was a young teen. I spent 2 months during the summer cleaning up and repairing various state parks that were within range of the camp we lived in.

It's a cool program. I got to meet kids from all over the state. I still have a scar on my arm where some barb wire got me while fixing a fence.

I also got to spend two months away from home AND I got paid for it. What teen could ask for more? They still have that program running today, though I'm sure there have been some changes over the decades.

[Túrin Turambar]

I’m still following stories related to this topic, and I read an interesting one in the Melbourne Age this week. It begins:

A group of journalism students took my undergraduate university course on entrepreneurship and innovation. They were bright, creative, fun to teach and strong communicators. What a pity most will never work in a newsroom, such is the pressure on media companies to cut costs.
How many other university disciplines educate far more students than needed? How many marketing students are needed as technology drastically cuts marketing costs? How many graduate accountants, lawyers or technology students will be needed as firms outsource work offshore?
How many PhD students will find work as full-time academics as the Federal government cuts university funding and if massive open online courses reshape higher education?
Will there be a point where the supply of university graduates exceeds demand by so much that students no longer see sufficient value in spending three of four years at university, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, and finding their degrees count for less upon graduation?

I don’t recall the exact figures, but around 1950, about 10% of high school graduates would go on to attend university. Now about 50% do. The number of jobs requiring academic tertiary qualifications has also increased, but nowhere near five-fold. This, of course, is part of the problem faced by graduates with non-specialist and non-vocational degrees, such as BAs – they have been in a large part crowded out of the graduate job market.

I admit that I find the higher education ‘arms race’ one of the more troubling things about modern society. Once everyone started getting degrees, they became necessary for positions which never required them before. Sales representatives today commonly have business degrees, when they never did in the past. Those degrees cost money to both the individual and the taxpayer, both in actual expenses and opportunity cost from lost income. I don’t doubt that high school graduates with an aptitude for the role still couldn’t fill all those positions, so I suspect that the only people really gaining materially from this state of affairs are those involved in higher education.

The author of the article has some unusual ideas about fixing the problem, but it seems to me that there must be some connection between the places offered in different degrees on one hand and the demand for graduates from those fields on the other. Unless, of course, the students are doing the course solely for the sake of learning, in which case everyone needs to be upfront about it. But how many people really enrol in university without any expectation that a more engaging, secure and better-paid job lies at the other end?

[axordil]

In the US, the perpetuation of student debt serves a deeper political purpose. Chomsky has a lot to say on this, and for once I don't think he's over the top. It's a sleeker version of the company store model, expanded to the whole society.

[elfshadow]

I thought student loans were bad. Then I started med school. Over four years, I will take out $200,000 in unsubsidized debt as an in-state student at a public university. And yet, somehow, many people still believe that physicians make too much money and that the best way to handle the high cost of health care is to decrease Medicare reimbursements? Needless to say, student debt is a touchy subject for me.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

At first, I read that last sentence as beginning "Needles to say ... ."

Quite appropriate for our doctor-to-be, I think.