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John Howard on education and opportunity:
We went through a generation in this country where parents discouraged their children from going into trades, and they said to them, “the only way you will get ahead in life is to stay at school until year 12, go to university.” Year 12 retention rates became the goal, high year 12 retention rates became the goal. Instead of us as a nation recognising there are some people who shouldn’t go to university, and what they should do is at year 10, decide they are going to become a tradesman. They will be just as well off, and from my experience and observation, a great deal better off than many others. I think we have to change that, and it’s a very big challenge because 30 years ago, we started getting this foolish bind that everybody had to go to university. Everybody doesn’t have to go to university, and a lot of people will be a lot better off if they don’t go to university and they recognise that at age 15 or 16, and go down the technical stream.
Seems reasonable enough; why should people gifted enough to join the workforce at a young age be forced to undergo the years of tertiary education required by slower learners? Yet Howard’s mild views have provoked much hostile opposition.
(Via J.F. Beck)
I remember when those who know best for us used to insist kids should go to college for the broadening experience, to be exposed to worldviews and concepts they otherwise might never know of.
Enter Ward Churchill…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 07 at 10:34 AM • permalinkOh, and Howard’s comments do apply to faculty, too, right?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 07 at 10:35 AM • permalinkAnd Taspundit your point is utterly ridiculous. There are thousands, millions of people who have gone to university, got good jobs, and vote Labor, and many the other way round that vote Liberal. Stereotyping will get you nowhere.
Also, to assume that this is all based on political point-scoring is laughable.
We have this problem in the UK. The government keep insisting that more and more people go to do more and more worthless degrees. Kids in schools now just look at university as something that they MUST do. they don’t know why, but it is treated like a rite of passage. So we have the state of affairs where we have thousands of kids doing media studies degrees and end up as expers on inter generational conflicts in Australian soap operas, who are unemployalbe, while at the same time the construction industry faces a recruitment crisis. This is because vocational education is seen as less important and valuable than academic. Stupid because many plumbers are now on £50,000 a year and you hear about lawyers retraining to become one. Those Australian pricks who were writing those columns need to realise that Howard is not involved in some evil scheme to keep working people away from higher education - he is making the obvious point that university is not, and should not be, for everyone.
I personally don’t think that kids should be taught that they must go to university at the earliest opportunity. I didn’t. I left school at 18, had a variety of different jobs, and did a BA at night school. My subsequent education has also been done while holding down a full-time job (apart from the one year I spent training to be a librarian). I now have a PhD in history (my new book ‘The Foreign Office and Finland 1938-1940’ has just been published - please encourage your local library to buy as many copies as possible).
Anyway, I’ve got to find someone to do the damp coursing by Monday. Do you think any anti-Howard critics might be able to point me in the right direction?There are thousands, millions of people who have gone to university, got good jobs….
Nic, Mr. Howard was kind enough to use data that could be supported. Data that described a shortage of trade skills. Data that made a point. Can you back yours up?
Or at least attempt a less emotional response? Because all he suggests is (gasp!) that some people ought to consider a trade, not a profession (i.e., a sheeps skin hanging on the wall). I’ve known many people who didn’t need a college degree, or shouldn’t have gotten one, and did well without it.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 03 07 at 11:04 AM • permalinkWe have the same problem in America. “Everybody’s gotta right to a college education” went the cry in the Fifties, and the MrS degree, among other things, was born. There’s an essay of Florence King’s called “The Graves of Academe” that everyone should read (you can find it in her collection Reflection in a Jaundiced Eye. Basically, she asserts that very few people now in the universities actually need to be there, including writers.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 03 07 at 11:24 AM • permalinkOr, as I always say, if you think everyone should get a college degree, the next time your toilet stops up, call a Ph.D.
Posted by Barbara Skolaut on 2005 03 07 at 12:30 PM • permalink‘Scuse me, when I said
I’ve known many people who didn’t need a college degree, or shouldn’t have gotten one, and did well without it.
What I meant was
I’ve known many people who didn’t need a college degree, and did well without it, and people who shouldn’t have gotten one in the first place.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 03 07 at 12:44 PM • permalinkI worked for many years in a university and saw hordes of young people there who would have been better served in a trade school. Many of them, in fact, were cheated by their primary educators, as demonstrated by the high numbers who needed remedial English and math courses before they could tackle a regular course of study.
Add in faculty apathy, grade inflation, and too much emphasis on sociopolitics, and lo and behold: vast numbers of college degrees pimped almost to the point of worthlessness (the exceptions being engineering and medical degrees, programs that are crammed to bursting with students from Third World countries).
I know it’s fashionable to bash the U.S. school system, but anyway: What the hell are American high school students actually learning? I look at what college students are doing in the first two years of their bachelors degree, and it’s stuff we’ve done back in Germany in approximately 9th to 12th grade. WTF? And I certainly wasn’t attending any kind of elite school. (Though we’ve got our own problems with declining standards…German schools are well on their way to becoming the joke of Europe, albeit not quite there yet.)
The kind of remedial math and language classes regularly offered to freshmen in American colleges that RebeccaH mentions wouldn’t even pass the laugh test in most other countries. You plain don’t get into college elsewhere if you’re so woefully unequiped.
In other words, I’d like to submit that the problem in the U.S. isn’t just that college is now considered near-mandatory, but the fact that the disastrous high schools have made it that way.
I realized that at 17 (1971) when, at the first job I had at McDonalds, the man flipping burgers had a Masters in History. Was kind of a wake-up call, as I was considering majoring in history.
And PW, American schools have slid woefully, even since I went in the 1960’s (and I was a victim of the “new math”). My children couldn’t even tell me when important events happened in our own STATE, much less the US and the world. It was absolutely appalling, and I made sure that they read extra materials to fill in the blank spots.
Elizabeth
Imperial KeeperPosted by Elizabeth Imperial Keeper on 2005 03 07 at 04:21 PM • permalinkDirty Harry: “Sociology? Oh, you’ll go far…
I’m guessing that’s probably what Nic is majoring in right now, or something similar.
The vast majority of people attending university who get jobs when they graduate… would have attended anyway without government encouragement. And they would be doing something with some sort of practical, money making application attached to it.
For lots of things university is more of a selection tool for employers anyway. That’s why it’s not enough to go to college these days. The real fact of life is that the distribution of ability/work ethic that makes a good employee/employer lies on a bell curve. And for most jobs, the people on the untalented or lazy end of things don’t make good employees.
If everyone goes to college, employers find a different selection tool. They start using the Ivy League schools, grad schools, grades, internships etc. as identifiers of talent.
And btw, there are many US high schools and universities doing a very good job. I personally know a few kids that were able to take Advanced Placement courses in highschool, and in so doing were able to eliminate the first 2 years of an engineering degree. To the point of taking differential equations.
I’m going to agree here with Mr. Howard. My younger brother is an auto mechanic, and earns more than I do in my ‘professional’ day job. Heck, if it makes you happy and feeds your family, what’s the shame in being a tradesman or blue-collar guy? Apparently the worker only qualifies as “noble salt of the earth” if they vote Democrat.
Now, if you really wanted to bust chops at the university, you would provide an alternative to the majors and graduate programs that exist merely to give you a bachelor’s and possibly a masters before the state will let you do anything in your chosen field. (At great expense, of course - you’ll be too busy working off student loans to ask uncomfortable questions of the academic orthodoxy.)
Seriously, why should you need a masters in education to get a decent job at a high school? I’d allow specialty schools with rigorous academic standards to offer teaching-only programs, graduate in 18 months, maybe two years. Working schlubs can go to evening classes and be certified in three. It would have the deliciously-welcome side-effect of twisting the proper knickers over at the NEA, and force the lib-mills into a little accountability. You could probably certify lawyers in the same way.
Apex Tech and other trade schools let you become certified master mechanics and stuff, and that involves heavy, dangerous machinery; an unreliable semi or a poorly-repaired crane can kill dozens. Why not teaching?
“I can’t phone you… You have to take the first [pause] step.”
Cutting funding from universities is definately not going to help anyone.
Apart from taxpayers?As for the skills shortage, I’d bet that the hot water system blew up at the Lodge and Howard needed a plumber quickly (impossible in Canberra).
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2005 03 07 at 07:51 PM • permalinkPW: my experience is that much of ‘remedial’ nature of many of the math, language, etc. courses in the first two years of college are intended for non-majors to meet “distribution requirements”.
You probably won’t find many math majors in those introductory math courses—they have “placed out” and are in the courses targetted to them. Instead you’d find English Lit majors taking “Intro to Numbers” and Engineers taking “The Influence of Shakespeare in DC Comics” only because the university has imposed that as a gradulation requirement.
This may be wrong (I certainly think so) but it is not of itself due to poor secondary education.
“The Influence of Shakespeare in DC comics?”
I wish, sounds like it would be a fun blow-off course. No, the engineers at my school had to take political indoctrination classes such as “cultural anthropology”. Where you are forced to write essays on how the corrosive influence of capitalism has forced the people of the third world into wage slavery.
my experience is that much of ‘remedial’ nature of many of the math, language, etc. courses in the first two years of college are intended for non-majors to meet “distribution requirements�.
I know that. My point is that almost everywhere else, even your budding Lit major is expected to have gotten a working knowledge of math from high school. I’m not kidding about the typical Math 0xx undergrad course being 9th or 10th grade stuff elsewhere in the world. (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually 7th or 8th grade in some East Asian countries, even.)
And that argument can be extended…just to take one example from my own uni: (152) American History: 1877 to the Present. Are you kidding me? And it’s all the worse that these kinds of courses are geared towards people needing to satisfy their diversity requirements (or whatever each college’s euphemism is). If this was an in-depth look at, well, American history from 1877 to today, great. But it’s a 100 level blah-blah course that requires absolutely no prior knowledge. People simply shouldn’t get out of high school not knowing the basic (and maybe a few not so basic) details of the last 100 or so years of their own country.
Taspundit got what I’m trying to get at here. Because so many students are coming out of high school as functionally clueless about all and sundry subjects (and worse, often don’t recognize just how clueless they are), the college leftists have had much easier a job pushing their indoctrination onto the student body, in the name of giving students a basic working knowledge.
Fix your schools so that your average, public-schooled 18-year old actually has some skills in critical thinking, and fixing the colleges will become MUCH easier. (No wonder private schools are booming, really, given the circumstances.)
PW: Is your average person, 18 years old or not, actually capable of learning critical thinking skills if they were taught?
What is seen in American colleges with remedial courses etc. is more a function of the sheer numbers of students attending colleges these days. Colleges use the SAT because it is basically a proxy IQ test, which is also the best predictor of success in college.
IQ is (as a first order approximation) normally distributed in the population. Which means as more kids (the majority) are encouraged to go to college, you get more of the people of average or below average IQ attending. So the kids you see in remedial classes, woefully unprepared for colleges… are not that way as a result of schooling (although it has some effect), it’s simply because they don’t have the mental horsepower to grasp the concepts, by and large.
The folks at Gene Expression cover these issues thoroughly.
I expect that very soon someone will trot out stats that show that the average university graduate’s income is higher than the average tradey’s.
They will do it to try and discredit the PM’s argument.
Of course, while it is true that an employee tradey might not earn a lot, the large number of self employed or contract tradesmen (potential liberal voters?) have a hell of a lot of business deductions substantially lowering ther ‘income’, particularly compared with PAYE white collar workers. The stats won’t tell the whole story.taspundit — That would be the engineers the evil capitalists hire to build their evil, uh, capitalist things…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 07 at 11:04 PM • permalinktaspundit: if you go to community college (2 year college—it used to be called “junior college”) then you don’t have to take the SATs. People who graduate community college can then enter universities as juniors; they’ve basically taken the core course for whatever their major is.
Feh, college, what a waste of years of my life.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 03 08 at 12:22 AM • permalinktaspundit: Journalism actually :)
Jeffs, you seem to have missed my point. Im fine with Howard saying that its not a bad or degrading thing to go get a trade, and you dont have to go to university to get ahead. My gripe is that he is cutting funding to universities.
Figures? Obviously there really arent any, but I know at least 50 of each type that I mentioned (TAFE people voting Labor, university people voting Liberal), so if you take that as a reasonable distribution, taspundit’s assumption is far from accurate.
ArtVan - It wont help taxpayers, as it mostly goes into keeping the surplus up so Howard can brag about it.
I’m not kidding about the typical Math 0xx undergrad course being 9th or 10th grade stuff elsewhere in the world.
I agree with you that most of the courses targetted for College Freshman and Sophomores (the 0xx, 1xx and 2xx level) are essentially the same coursework as 9th or 10th great stuff offered “elsewhere in the world”. Not sure I agree that that statement doesn’t also include the U.S. though.
It seems there are many who believe colleges offer the courses because there is a need to teach what was some how not effectively taught before. Perhaps this is true for many, even most students. I don’t know. I only know that for myself, and, it seemed to me at the time, for many of my classmates, we were not in the class to ‘catch up’ on anything. We were quite aware that we were repeating work previously covered in high school. Sure there were some classes outside my major I took based on real interest, but with a “distribution” schedule requiring 75% of class hours be in courses outside the major, it can’t be a surprise that some of the classes taken were BECAUSE they were repeats of past material and were, therefore, easy and allowed more time to focus on the courses which were my reason for going to college in the first place.
So - two different issues, yes? How to address a need for remedial coursework for underprepared college students (a premise on which I am not convinced). And whether there is a benefit to imposing “topic exposure” requirements on students who have presumably covered broad basics before they were accepted to the university. I care more about the latter because I reckon it cost me over $30,000 out of pocket to take those classes I did not need and did not want. And though it’s YEARS later, I still resent it.
Well, Nic, so what if he is cutting funding to the universities? If trade schools, not college courses, are needed, why not shift the education priorities? This is called a “budget”.
Again, you had an emotional reaction. “Omigawd, don’t cut the uni funding, millions of people need a degree!” That’s not exactly what you said, but it is the tone.
Cutting funding will require people to make a choice on their life. Instead of a taking a 4 year course of study (funded by the taxpayer), followed up by a career at McDonalds, people must decide if they want to learn a trade.
The problem is that a college education is not a right or entitlement, it’s a choice based on need and ability. As pointed above, if we have colleges that offer “Basketweaving 101” type courses, what are they teaching? What is the value of having a university system that does not produce valuable commodities such as trained professionals?
The answer is that there is no value, except to the educational system itself.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 03 08 at 01:59 AM • permalinkNic, do yourself a favor and do a statistics course while you are at college. In the future you are going to be competing in the journalistic marketplace with people who can do math. Otherwise known as bloggers.
My point was not that people at tafe or at university vote liberal or labor. My point was that people who have don’t have the ability for college but have the ability to do something practical (plumbing, carpentry, building, mining etc) are going to end up with more money sooner if they do the practical thing via an apprenticeship.
The sooner they accrue some money the better they are going to be as marriage prospects, in general. In general, marriage causes a shift in viewpoint towards conservatism, especially in females.
Increase the number of married people and you increase the number of Howard voters, plain and simple. Labor does the exact opposite, it acts to keep people single so as to increase their base.
Whether this is “good” or “bad” depends on your viewpoint.
JeffS, the value of this idea is that these people either ride the gravy train while it lasts and then end up either
a) at McDonalds
b) on the dole
c) work for the government - in quasi-political government organizations, such as climate scientists, EPA officers, as public servants in various welfare agencies etc. Or professors/teachers in the education system.You can pay for all this by levying punitive taxes on the wealthy, definied as anyone making more than $60k per year.
Make no mistake, this has value to certain people. It allows them to have money while doing a minimum of work, and also drags your competition down to your level. It works great for a while before the country goes down the economic gurgler. For other examples of this see the Whitlam era.
debo,
So - two different issues, yes? How to address a need for remedial coursework for underprepared college students (a premise on which I am not convinced). And whether there is a benefit to imposing “topic exposure� requirements on students who have presumably covered broad basics before they were accepted to the university. I care more about the latter because I reckon it cost me over $30,000 out of pocket to take those classes I did not need and did not want. And though it’s YEARS later, I still resent it.
I can definitely empathize with that “what a waste of time and money” feeling. But I’d suggest, if this actually applied to the majority of students, there would be a huge outcry by parents and students alike about having their money wasted like that. That doesn’t seem to be the case (yet), hence my suspicion that the majority of freshman students is in fact underprepared when entering college. (Whether a quasi-propaganda course disguised as “introductory history” or somesuch actually serves to help them catch up is then a whole different problem…)
I don’t doubt that a Math 090 type of curriculum is also on the typical high school schedule, but the percentage of students who don’t actually learn any of it seems to be much higher in the U.S. than elsewhere. It’s just wishful thinking, but perhaps it’s time to introduce a final examination at the end of grade 12, as exists in many other countries?
taspundit,
Is your average person, 18 years old or not, actually capable of learning critical thinking skills if they were taught?
I firmly believe they are. That most don’t exhibit any such skills isn’t just a function of failing schools of course; plenty of blame should go to the parents as well. (But that’s another can of worms…) Anyway, merely two generations ago, basically everyone was expected to function as an adult at age 16 (or even earlier)...the infantilization of today’s teenagers has become a huge problem. Society just doesn’t expect 18 year olds to take responsibility for anything anymore, and that’s just wrong.
What is seen in American colleges with remedial courses etc. is more a function of the sheer numbers of students attending colleges these days. (...) as more kids (the majority) are encouraged to go to college, you get more of the people of average or below average IQ attending. So the kids you see in remedial classes, woefully unprepared for colleges… are not that way as a result of schooling (although it has some effect), it’s simply because they don’t have the mental horsepower to grasp the concepts, by and large.
I’d say only a small percentage of kids is intellectually incapable of grasping 100-level curricula, but obviously a larger percentage isn’t cut out for the full 4 year bachelor. That’s why I’m saying intro-level stuff needs to be moved back into 10th grade high school, so you don’t get these students who are basically shoehorned into college because “you have to have some kind of higher education nowadays”. They should be able to get that kind of basic knowledge in high school…which would then allow them and their parents to make the smart choice right away, e.g. trade schools. As it is, these kids generally waste at least two years of their life until they realize they’re not made for academia.
Howard is wrong to encourage High School drop-outs. Everyone should finish their Secondary education (Year 12/High School) as adult competency in literary and numerary matters is a pre-requisite for citizenship in a technological state.
Howard is also wrong to demean Tertiary education, although I know where he is coming from. Why not call all post-Secondary education “Tertiary”, without the snobby distinction between Techs & Unis? People should be encouraged to do basic Tertiary education as part of life-long learnig. They all deserve social respect.
Howard is correct to praise tradesmen. The demeaning of Tradesmen as being a sub-university level of intellect is pure snobbishness. Its all knowledge and knowledge is good.
Especially as modern tradesmen have to be adept at reading technical drawings and performing computer diagnostics, stuff that would probably be beyond the ken of the average Arts graduate.Jeffs, the problem with that statement is that Howard has cut the budget so severly and made so many changes to university education, that we are looking at a trend of more and more full-fee paying places, and less and less HECS places - we will end up with an American-style system where only the rich and a few scholarship winners will get to attend university without giving up their life savings. I dont think anyone wants that, at least I hope not.
Taspundit, I would challenge that assumption too. What percentage of the population gets married at some stage? Id say its reasonably high, over 70% at least. Obviously all these people did not vote Liberal. Again, from the people that I know - and they are across the spectrum incase you were wondering - I have noticed a peculiar absense of the trend that you describe, marriage and vote seem to have no correlation either way whatsoever. People working in trades might get married earlier, but this does not mean those who went to university wont get married at some stage either.
Also I dont think its fair to assume you wont get a job when you finish university, and will instead end up working at McDonalds. Neither is it fair to assume that universities mostly produce teachers and government workers. Here in WA at least, Curtin university churns out a very very large amoung of business and finance related graduates, who go into the private sector. UWA produces many doctors and lawers who are very very highly paid, have reasonablly high employment opportunities, and are probably some of the most likely Liberal voters. Look at electorates in WA like Nedlands and Cotteslote (state) and Curtin (federal) that constitute Liberal heartland. A disproporinate number of doctors, lawyers and the like live there. I know this because I have quite a number of friends there and quite a number of them, and the people they know, have parents who are in those occupations. Also, why is it that I live in an area where a *lot* of tradespeople live (the greater Midland area) and it will vote Labor every single election? Its even more this way in my birthplace of Armadale, which is ridiculously safe Labor territory.
From what I can see at least, your theory doesnt add up.
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Let me add this: “Fuck yeah!” About time someone called a spade a spade. Congratulations, Howard.
The only reason labor is against this is because these kids getting apprenticeships will get jobs, money, be able to buy a house and provide for a family… and someday vote liberal.
Labor would prefer to give these people handouts, conning them into taking 4 years of tertiary basketweaving only to be left without any job prospects when they graduate, believing the world owes them a living. And creating lifetime labor voters in the process.