I may be out of step, but I do not believe there is a crisis in education.  There is a crisis of remembering what it was like when one was young.  I have returned to college after six years of retirement.  I am working on a BA in Creative Writing and I have had to take some two hundred level courses.  That has put me into class with students who have generally been out of high school for one to three years.  After 32 years working in public and private schools I am facing the products of the failing American school system.
     It has been an interesting year and I have learned many things I should have learned earlier in my life.  I am finding the university classes challenging and full of new information filling gaps in my understandings and knowledge base.  While I am more focused than I was when I began work toward my initial degree, I am finding many of my classmates to be just as focused and willing to work hard for a good grade.  There are also students in my classes who were just like I was when I began, confused, unfocused and working to complete their program and get out into the real world.  The point I am making is I do not see students who are less prepared than I or any different from the students I encountered in my first go round in college over  forty five years ago.
     Sometimes, when speaking with my peers I wonder why they were so different than I when we were young.  I realize now that it a memory gap.  The 'good old days' were superior to these days.  The funny thing is I get the feeling that the 20 year old students in class with me today will feel the same way when they are older.  I bet there are many different ways of looking at this situation.

College Ready

I have begun a change in life related to my career in education.  Upon retirement I felt like many and could not really stop working.  I concerned myself with education issues and worked as a substitute, did some post retirement work as a school librarian, attended conferences on the brain and learning, spent some time working for PBS Teacherline, taught an online University course, did some contracting at a charter school and started this blog.  I developed a belief that kindness and cooperation are the missing ingredients in education.  I read Nel Noddings' Happiness and Education and concluded that she is right, we have worried too much about the technical side of education and not enough about the social emotional growth of the young people in our country and the goal of education should be to learn how to be happy.

As I have been going through my various stages of retirement education reform has been proceeding full blast.  Predicated upon the perception that our children are not prepared for the future and worries that other countries beat our scores on standardized tests it seems as though my generation of educators have utterly failed.  This has been a constant moan since I began teaching.  The public schools are failing our children seems to be a consensus that has been building for a certain portion of the U.S. population.  They want to replace our community based local control of education with school choice.  Schools whose only responsibility are the students they are teaching.  This seems to me a narrow view of education and seems to undermine the value of learning cooperation, diversity and common societal values.  It feels to me that the basic premise of this movement is if you don't like it, go somewhere else.  I always thought the American spirit had something to do with working through problems by finding common ground.  My ideas of kindness, happiness and cooperation don't seem to be the thinking of the educational establishment nor society in general.

So, I have decided to become a participant in education as opposed to being a proponent for any particular pedagogy.  I hope to experience the same college education our recent graduates are getting.  Of course I can not afford to go to Harvard, but I did obtain a scholarship for Vietnam Veterans sponsored by the state of New Mexico and I have enrolled at the University of New Mexico  as an English major studying creative writing.  I am starting over and trying to develop a second career as a writer, an idea that began with this blog and blossomed when I self published Bombs Away Buckaroos.  These projects have made me realize I never had training as a creative writer and have much to learn.  So, I have a goal but along the way hope to share my observations of the capabilities of my classmates and the quality of my education.

It has been an interesting two weeks but my overall impression is positive.  If we failed these students, then we failed my generation.  The students who go to the classes I do are interested, mostly do their work, seem to be future oriented and introspective.  They are certainly young adults who have the same problems all young adults have had with the meanings and problems of life in our culture.  My creative writing class is full of young minds who understand what they are asked to do and seem capable of doing it.  My first impressions of their writing is that they are no better or no worse that the students I attended with in 1965.

We will see.  I hope to report my impressions and share some of the work I am assigned as I progress through the beginning of the final third of my life or hopefully the 3rd quarter.  It sort of depends on having a healthy body and engaged mind!

College For All: An Unnecessary Goal for Public Schools

Some Useful Websites
Lure of the Labyrinth- A cool way to develop pre-algebra skills
Map Maker is a great site for middle school and high school students who want to add maps to a report.
Architect Studio 3D On this Web site, you can design a house, walk through it in 3D, and then share it with the world. You can also learn more about architecture, past and present, and explore Frank Lloyd Wright's life and work.
The How-To Series The five posts from the blog Free Technology for Teachers give directions on how to use Web. 2.0 tools in the classroom

Articles to To Read
Revolution and Evolution in Educational System by PRof.MSRO ICFAI, University of India

 Education and character are two sides of same coin and one without the other makes no sense. Money can come and go, but it is the character that is valid from the beginning to the end of life. Any person, whether they can be equipped with the formation of character of each part of the world beyond. To put it in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. Put “The function of education to teach an intensive course, to think and think critically intelligence and character ….. .. .. This is the goal of true education. “

Meeting Kids Where They Are-Not Where We Wish They Were  by Jack Schneider From Education Week

Precious, in all likelihood, is not going to college.
This runs contrary to the aims of the dominant players in modern school reform, who, whether they are in government, school districts, or philanthropic organizations, routinely employ the phrase “excellence for all” in justifying their expenditures. The theory of change among the educational entrepreneurs, it seems, is simple: Find what works and make it available to all students. As Teach For America’s chief executive officer, Wendy Kopp, has said of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: “He just wants to find and scale the ideas that work"

 Adolescence and Mistake-Based Education by Carl Pickhardt PHD in Psychology Today

In childhood, the age of dependence, a conscientious parent is often the best teacher. In adolescence, the age of independence, confronting hard consequences is often the best teacher. 

The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is it Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling? by Peter Gray in Psychology Today 

Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past fifty to seventy years. Today five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.

Books to Read
Happiness and Education by Nel Noddings

Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities and Ordinary Resurrections  says, 'Noddings' thesis and argument that happiness and education not only can but should coexist must be taken seriously by everyone concerned about preparing children and young adults for a truly satisfying life in our democratic society.'

Quote of the Week

I used to think that a college degree was the leg up to success in life, an accomplishment that made you a better person, a stronger contributor. I thought it mattered less where you went to college than what you did with that education. Now, I understand that as a first-generation graduate of Regional State U, and a Baby Boomer, I was simply part of "credential creep."         Quote from Nancy Flanagan in the blog, Teacher in A Strange Land

Thoughts from Yrisarri
Educational policy reform is being driven partially by the idea that our public school system should prepare all students for college.  This is not only unnecessary but it is unrealistic and based upon arrogant beliefs about the value of work.

The goal is being proposed by well-intentioned people who believe in diversity and want all Americans to have the advantages of a college degree.  The argument is that statistics show that a person with a college degree is more likely to have a higher salary than their peers who do not.  As a matter of fact, as you progress on the educational ladder you statistically improve your chances of higher lifetime earnings.

While that is true, what about individual desires?  Why should we base educational goals on population wide statistical analysis?  There will always be individuals who are not ready or do not want to enter into a program of studies at a college.  Many of our high school graduates can benefit from going to work, or doing volunteer work to help them make informed decisions about their futures.  Why should they have to prepare for college in the public schools?

It is arrogant to think that the only pathway to success in America is through a college education.   There has been a misguided notion about the trades and their importance in our society.  After all, Benjamin Franklin was a printer who was as erudite as his better educated peers.  The value of work should not depend upon completion of a program but upon the quality of that work.  It seems to me that in today’s world the value of work is determined by the needs of corporations.  They provide large salaries to workers they need to create more money, not those who provide a high quality of work.

We seem overly concerned about another set of statistics.  Those that measure success in being able to make high scores on tests.  Our children’s relative standing among nations of test takers seems too low for many and we have to improve.  Once again we are not thinking about quality education but about being able to pass a test.  America has always been at the forefront of innovation because our educational system has worked.  We have provided the best scientists to the world, not the most.

College is not truly necessary for success in America.  What contributes to America’s success, however, is our ability to go to college whenever we are ready.  This requires a citizenry that values education for its own sake and pursues learning as a normal part of life.  A recent study indicates that anxiety and depression have increased exponentially in our children over the past 50 years.  This is not going to provide a foundation for success in the future.  As long as we place our values on statistics and corporate needs and not on individual needs and desires, our foundation for success will be weak.