PUBLIC EDUCATION FAILURE
It's back to basics for many in college

From the Houston Chronicle:

Nearly two-thirds of 2004's graduating high school seniors now enrolled in Houston-area community colleges are taking remedial classes because they weren't prepared for college.

Sixteen local school districts sent 6,552 newly graduated students to the Houston Community College System and the North Harris Montgomery College District this fall. Sixty-four percent of them, or 4,217, are taking high school-level courses, according to the colleges.

And

Although the problem is generally worse among school districts with high poverty levels, such as Houston and Aldine, some of those with wealthier populations, including Spring Branch and Katy, face the same predicament.

And it's not just community college students who are struggling. Even those attending four-year universities lack many of the basic skills necessary to tackle college-level work as freshmen.

A report released this spring by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board found that half of the state's 2001 high school graduates needed remedial help in college.

Among Harris County's largest school districts, the percentage of 2001 graduates required to take high school-level courses in college ranged from 62 percent in Houston Independent School District to roughly a quarter of Katy ISD graduates. About one third of all college-bound students from Spring Branch ISD and Cy-Fair ISD needed extra help.

Click here for the rest.

This comes as no surprise.

As the Houston area public school establishment goes into crisis mode trying to figure out this latest educational travesty, I can already tell you what the problem is. Public education's overwhelming emphasis on discipline and authority not only creates an atmosphere that is detrimental to knowledge and understanding, but in prioritizing obedience as school's major goal, it also tends to deemphasize learning itself. Students, for the most part, are essentially on their own. Those who are either unwilling or unable to teach themselves fall through the cracks.

The solution is a massive revamp of the structure of public education: starting with the earliest levels, children must be taught the nature of democracy and communal action; that is, students must learn how to take charge of their own learning, as a group, which is extraordinarily difficult to do under the current system which mandates students' each and every move, making individual responsibility unlikely. Ideally, this would make the passing-but-not-understanding phenomenon go away: learning would be motivated from within, rather than by threat of punishment in the form of bad grades or disciplinary action.

Of course, this won't happen. Society is quite happy with the current system, and the corporate establishment is even happier: despite platitudes about democracy, America worships discipline and authority; the schools are the churches of this homegrown religion.

Sigh.

For more of my views on education and authority, click here.

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