[TriLUG] OT: PT One tech issue from tonight's debate

[matt at noway2.thruhere.net]

I thought that the article in the link made for interesting reading and a
couple of (related) things jumped out at me:

>From the article: "Fifty-four percent of jobs in San Jose, California fall
within the area of IT, but only 2 percent of students in the area are
graduating with IT degrees".  A similar statement was made about
accounting and math.

Both of these fields, are squarely (pardon the pun) in what would
typically be called 'geek' territory.  As long as schools, or rather our
society, continues to put more emphasis on football than on academic
education, we can expect this to continue.

This brings me to the second point.  Towards the bottom of the article, a
lot of emphasis is put on the need to fix the education system.  This
strikes me as the same kind of thinking that wants to hold teachers
accountable for student performance.  The relationships are elastic, and
while altering one can impact the other, cause and correlation is not
direct.

The problem is not so much with the schools and teachers, but with the
attitudes of the students, parents, and society in general; it does not
place sufficient value on education or see the importance of it.

While a case can be made that today more parents are working longer hours,
more homes have both parents outside of the home, etc, this doesn't change
the fact that focus on education needs to start and be strongest in the
home and it currently isn't.

Of course there are other problems, not the least of which is the cost.  I
have long believed that we are taking the wrong approach with No Child
Gets Ahead legislation and the focus on standardized testing as the metric
while holding the teachers (but not the students) accountable as this
causes a 'teach the test' phenomenon.

It is high time that we also recognize that a one size fits all education
really does not fit all.  Not all students have the same aptitudes, or
interests, nor will all of them attend college.  It is time to stop
focusing on artificial diversity for the sake of diversity and start
focusing on the basic skills, which used to be referred to as the 3 R's
and teaching kids how to think and reason for themselves.

The root problem is one of attitudes with the American People.  To see
this one has to look no further than the CNN homepage - US Section this
morning.  In addition to a couple of election articles, including one
about Coulter using some 'r' word (?? don't know ??), we have sports,
sports, sports, dogs under water, and skydiving stunts.  Look at the 'top
mover' on MSN: honey boo boo fakes sleep.

This tells me tthat either there is something wrong with the attitude of
this country, or Orwell's 1984 has come true with the great distraction
keeping the mass proletariat complacent with their booze and pornography.

> This article is interesting given the recent discussion
>
> http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121023144710-10189491-we-need-to-disrupt-education-now
>
>
> Craig
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