NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

[lakedaemonian]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/op...r.html?_r=1&hp

This one hits close to home for me.......it's a personal pet peeve of mine.

University education used to offer a pretty good return on investment with the salary it "purchased" for the average degree and the average student.

But while higher education inflation has exploded in the past 2 decades, for non-technical/tangible skills degrees starting salaries have been largely stagnant.

It certainly looks like US higher educations is driving towards a wall at 100mph....especially with early indicators like law schools offering retroactive grade point average increases to make their graduates more competitive...like some sort of academic version of Orwell's Ministry of Truth in 1984.

People complain about the ethics of used car salesmen......but I have yet to hear much spoken or written in the negative yet about college recruiters/admissions/financial aid staff selling a product with a negative return on investment.

I'm not a big fan of bailouts, but "buy in" for them must be contagious.....I'm wondering if one of the next few bailouts meant to restart the US economic motors to get us out of the flat-spin we are in will include a massive higher education bailout....and whether it's not such a bad idea.

Would an additional $100-200 billion in hard science research grants(nanotech, biotech, alternative energy, future transport, etc) have the potential to "save" US higher education, spark innovation, help create new industries, new businesses, and most importantly jobs?

What chance would an academic bailout have of achieving a reasonable return on investment?

Or does the US possess a mass excess of unneeded academic capacity in much the same way it possesses a mass excess in retail commercial property?

Is this the US version of Saudi Arabia's dangerous glut of unemployable Islamic Studies graduates?

Does US higher education get hollowed out?

Will we see considerable numbers of closures and consolidations/mergers in higher education?

While I am a HUGE believer in personal responsibility and the importance of due diligence, I truly pity those who graduated with massive student debt burdens and carry them along with a mortgage on a home purchased between 2002-2007.

They are now sitting on both a devalued degree and home, but still responsible for paying full F.I.R.E. economy retail value.

To me, seeing a possible(or even pending?) implosion of US higher education is like seeing the "cycle of life" broken.

Is it simply a choice between letting the US higher education system implode(and letting the "market" sort out what should fill that space) or throwing it a big bailout to keep it afloat and praying it offers a way out(via a Manhattan/Apollo sized initiative focused on future industry/transportation/energy/etc) without actually reorganizing/fixing it's massive disconnects with it's many negative return on investment degree programs?


Can we afford to let higher education collapse, even if we can't afford to pay for it's bailout?

Isn't higher education analogous to planting crops in the Spring to be harvested in the late Summer early Fall to get us through Winter?

Wouldn't a collapse of higher education equate to a crop failure and related hunger and deprivation?

In no way do I think US higher education will collapse entirely.....but could it potentially contract enough(beyond just unnecessary overcapacity) to cause serious harm to our ability to get through Winter?


I'm no expert....I'm just increasingly concerned that not enough attention is being placed on where higher education sits in the post F.I.R.E. economy dialogue.

Just my 0.02c

[Starving Steve]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I would rather witness higher education in America collapse than to see it go on the way it is. All education in America is in desperate need of reform. The problem is that education in America must be relevant to the world job market, NOT to the whims or so-called "standards" of universities. And the world job market demands do-ers, NOT academics.

Can you fix an oil well blow-out? Can you operate an atomic power plant? Can you solve a real- world problem like converting a V-8 motor away from gasoline to natural gas? Can you solve the problem of making natural gas available everywhere at filling-stations? Can you find cheap oil?
Can you make clean and cheap water available in deserts, in large quantities?

Can you make your car fly, and at a cheap conversion price? Can you put regenerative-braking into every vehicle, again at a cheap conversion price? Can you make land and homes in cities affordable? How do you raise the speed of traffic in cities?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I would rather witness higher education in America collapse than to see it go on the way it is. All education in America is in desperate need of reform. The problem is that education in America must be relevant to the world job market, NOT to the whims of Washington. And the world job market demands do-ers, NOT academics.

I would largely agree....but what of the often vaunted technology business incubator role that higher education often flaunts?

Even if incredibly dysfunctional, does higher education actually play an irreplaceable/critical role in new job creation in the US?

I often wonder what role outfits like this will play in our future:

http://techshop.ws/

Both in terms of education and business incubation.

[Starving Steve]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I like the idea of the SF Bay Area techshop. Forget about learning much of anything to-day in the universities and colleges.

If the recent folly of Dr. Al Gore and NOAA and global warming didn't prove what education is worth to-day, nothing will. Remember the quotes from Al Gore's book, The Inconvenient Truth, "The issue of global warming is settled." Remember the phrase, "The consensus of scientists is...."? Remember the computer-generated forecasts and maps of global warming from NOAA and Dr. Hansen, all based upon fudged data on temperature? And note how quiet the so-called "scientists" are now on AGW and carbon in the atmosphere; some even pretending that nothing has been revealed in the newspapers about their fraud. (ref. James Delingpole and his revelations on AGW, "Climategate, the Final Nail in the Coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'" published in the London Evening Telegraph, Nov 20, 2009.)

And now we have the folly with Ben Bernanke and his failed policies from Princeton University in economics. This disaster is just unfolding now.

And now we have solar energy: the latest series of solar lights which produce 1.7watts per hour of energy and can't even stay lit for a short night on Vancouver Island in summer, even after a clear day of uninterrupted sunshine..... And how many billions of dollars have been wasted on solar energy projects? Solar energy paint comes next--- kind of like the glowing wallpaper of the 1950s.

I don't want to be too negative. So certainly, tech workshops are the best way for people and capital and ideas to come together. We would all learn from each other in such workshops.

Thank you for your very interesting post.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I would rather witness higher education in America collapse than to see it go on the way it is. All education in America is in desperate need of reform. The problem is that education in America must be relevant to the world job market, NOT to the whims or so-called "standards" of universities. And the world job market demands do-ers, NOT academics.

Can you fix an oil well blow-out? Can you operate an atomic power plant? Can you solve a real- world problem like converting a V-8 motor away from gasoline to natural gas? Can you solve the problem of making natural gas available everywhere at filling-stations? Can you find cheap oil?
Can you make clean and cheap water available in deserts, in large quantities?

Can you make your car fly, and at a cheap conversion price? Can you put regenerative-braking into every vehicle, again at a cheap conversion price? Can you make land and homes in cities affordable? How do you raise the speed of traffic in cities?

I see the same facts and draw a conclusion nearly opposite; it’s not the fault of universities. Business runs on an ever-faster pace of change, chasing the new most profitable market. Universities develop slowly, educating students who turn into teachers who prepare new grads. That cycle will always take 30 years. And it is a simple fact of human life that it takes 20 years to master a trade, be it welding or surgery or designing aircraft.

Most of the things you mention aren’t academic specialties; they are applications of general engineering and science. Business must step up and take a fresh grad with a general degree in mechanical engineering and train her for that particular specialized trade. They are too shortsighted to staff enough people or to pay them well enough to stay, and so keep their pool of talent robust. Every company I ever worked for viewed their engineering departments as cost centers; treated them poorly; demanded they work massive overtime to cover for short staffing; and paid them mediocre wages at best. Rumor has it some American firms like 3M continue to value their technical talent, but I’ve never seen it personally.

Corporations who enter an all-new business area and look to universities to just turn on a spigot to pour out fresh grads tailored to their new needs are fools. If US corporations won’t pay the money to train and nurture their technical talent pools, from hands-on trade-craft up through engineers and research scientists, they can’t expect universities to quick whip up a fresh batch of MRI designers or carbon-composite lay-up techs. We have 7 million people looking for work right now, and many are pretty quick learners. For American business to whine that the universities don’t give them the people trained exactly as they prefer is a lame excuse. Make due with what actually exists.

[reggie]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I would rather witness higher education in America collapse than to see it go on the way it is.

Agreed.

All education in America is in desperate need of reform. The problem is that education in America must be relevant to the world job market, NOT to the whims or so-called "standards" of universities. And the world job market demands do-ers, NOT academics.

Globalization has turned the purpose of an education on its head. The ability to think and reason has been exchanged for an ability to outperform your competition in a specific vertical. Why, what's the benefit of this crazy system?

See Sir James Goldsmith and the video interview on the Charlie Rose show posted here at iTulip.

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...ames-Goldsmith

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...mic-advisor%29

[grapejelly]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

scratch the surface and you find gubmint subsidies through cheap credit are to blame, as usual. Made the cost of higher education go up far faster than the cost of living. And assured a public labor union approach to academia.

Gary North has written some great pieces on the future of higher education. Basically, most universities and colleges are doomed. On line education will become cheap and easy. And only the elite schools today will continue serving elite students from elite fams. I agree completely. Great opportunities for startups and smart entrepreneurs.

[bpr]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/op...r.html?_r=1&hp

This one hits close to home for me.......it's a personal pet peeve of mine.

What a great thread, thanks for sharing.

University education used to offer a pretty good return on investment with the salary it "purchased" for the average degree and the average student.

But while higher education inflation has exploded in the past 2 decades, for non-technical/tangible skills degrees starting salaries have been largely stagnant.

I would say 3 decades. My eldest sibling entered college in 1984. When I entered college ten years later the cost of tuition was twice what she had to bear.

Just to mention private high-schooling:
She entered a private college-prep high school in 1980. When I entered the same college-prep high school (the cheapest of its kind in the country) in 1990, the tuition was EIGHT TIMES the cost to our parents.

It certainly looks like US higher educations is driving towards a wall at 100mph....especially with early indicators like law schools offering retroactive grade point average increases to make their graduates more competitive...like some sort of academic version of Orwell's Ministry of Truth in 1984.

People complain about the ethics of used car salesmen......but I have yet to hear much spoken or written in the negative yet about college recruiters/admissions/financial aid staff selling a product with a negative return on investment.

You are leaving out the high school guidance counselors, who are a big-time sales force.

I'm not a big fan of bailouts, but "buy in" for them must be contagious.....I'm wondering if one of the next few bailouts meant to restart the US economic motors to get us out of the flat-spin we are in will include a massive higher education bailout....and whether it's not such a bad idea.

Would an additional $100-200 billion in hard science research grants(nanotech, biotech, alternative energy, future transport, etc) have the potential to "save" US higher education, spark innovation, help create new industries, new businesses, and most importantly jobs?

What chance would an academic bailout have of achieving a reasonable return on investment?

Wow, great questions.

When you focus on ROI, though, you have to recognize a loss in innovation.

This is debatable, but I do believe that we have not fully tapped our innovative capability via higher education, either in the liberal arts or in the physical sciences, or in any of the in-betweens.

The problem with ROI as a determinant is time. Currently, ROI is determined by the ADHD world of Wall Street. This is where you get these ideas of pouring "$100-200 billion in hard science research grants" resulting in "spark innovation, help create new industries, new businesses, and most importantly jobs?"

The answer is, yes.

Yes, that kind of investment will work. We saw it after WWII here in the U.S.

But, it took 25 years of such investment.

And, in order to get the population behind that kind of investment we needed to have the Russians beating our asses in space.

Or does the US possess a mass excess of unneeded academic capacity in much the same way it possesses a mass excess in retail commercial property?

Is this the US version of Saudi Arabia's dangerous glut of unemployable Islamic Studies graduates?

Does US higher education get hollowed out?

Will we see considerable numbers of closures and consolidations/mergers in higher education?

Yes, yes and YES!!!

You have to realize that the class of 2015 is going to be filled with technical specialists with B.S. (you can decide what that stands for) certifications from institutions solely created to game the federal loan subsidy system.

Have a look at how it works (behind the scenes at the ubiquitous University of Phoenix online):
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...ource=proglist

While I am a HUGE believer in personal responsibility and the importance of due diligence, I truly pity those who graduated with massive student debt burdens and carry them along with a mortgage on a home purchased between 2002-2007.

They are now sitting on both a devalued degree and home, but still responsible for paying full F.I.R.E. economy retail value.

That's my generation. It's pretty ugly for those of us that followed the trends. But it's very much generational. The boomers were the biggest consumers and the biggest producers for a long while in either direction on the timeline. As their consumption contracts there will be an overshoot.

To me, seeing a possible(or even pending?) implosion of US higher education is like seeing the "cycle of life" broken.

Is it simply a choice between letting the US higher education system implode(and letting the "market" sort out what should fill that space) or throwing it a big bailout to keep it afloat and praying it offers a way out(via a Manhattan/Apollo sized initiative focused on future industry/transportation/energy/etc) without actually reorganizing/fixing it's massive disconnects with it's many negative return on investment degree programs?

Can we afford to let higher education collapse, even if we can't afford to pay for it's bailout?

Isn't higher education analogous to planting crops in the Spring to be harvested in the late Summer early Fall to get us through Winter?

Wouldn't a collapse of higher education equate to a crop failure and related hunger and deprivation?

I think it has a lot to do with how you define the term collapse.

I surmise we would define it differently.

A few seasons - even a generation - of drought and crop failure may bankrupt a farmer and his family, but the fields will persist and return to productivity.

But we definitely need to cut the weeds out if we're going to publicly fund this stuff.

There is no place for the for-profit institutions in federal grants and loan guarantees, and there is shaky ground for privately held non-profit institutions getting federal aid for their students. (and, I'd argue, we need to re-locate the federal aid on the institutions, not on the students; clearly the institutions are considering it when determining their operating budgets, while students are only considering their as-yet -undetermined-and only-theoretical-according-to-US-News-And-World-Report-budgets).*

In no way do I think US higher education will collapse entirely.....but could it potentially contract enough(beyond just unnecessary overcapacity) to cause serious harm to our ability to get through Winter?


I'm no expert....I'm just increasingly concerned that not enough attention is being placed on where higher education sits in the post F.I.R.E. economy dialogue.

Just my 0.02c

I'm no expert either, but there's going to be a very interesting Winter coming. I'm wondering whether it's 5, 10 or 15 years out. Perhaps sooner.

The sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned. We need to clear the academy of the charlatans, for sure.


*I should note that I don't mention "baby boomers" as a pejorative term, but rather an economic demographic that was extraordinarily large given the larger population. Fact is, universities expanded to include more of them. Then reduced standards to allow their children. Then further reduced standards to continue the ever-needed growth of a capitalist society.

[hayekvindicated]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I had admission to an Ivy League School for a master's degree. I thought about it a lot after getting the admission and did a careful evalulation of cost. I couldn't justify it - particularly when British univeristies of equivalent status were giving a master's for a LOT less than half the cost. I decided not to go to the US. Best decision I ever made in my life.

Financially, I am better off than almost any American student who graduated at the same time.

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

scratch the surface and you find gubmint subsidies through cheap credit are to blame, as usual. Made the cost of higher education go up far faster than the cost of living. And assured a public labor union approach to academia.

Gary North has written some great pieces on the future of higher education. Basically, most universities and colleges are doomed. On line education will become cheap and easy. And only the elite schools today will continue serving elite students from elite fams. I agree completely. Great opportunities for startups and smart entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately, it is well known that "elite" universities and their ilk are central to the destruction of the West. The scenario you describe has no chance of happening. At best, those purveyors of cultural destruction in said universities will in time be purged. At worst, many of these universities will be shut down simply due to the large numbers of psychopaths they produce who have played a disproportionate role in the destruction of our nation.

The great problem we have in the United States is the legitimacy of liberal-democratic regimes is predicated on the fiction of meritocracy. It is becoming increasingly well known how they tend to discriminate against the majority of Americans in favor of an abstract multicultural agenda. As life becomes increasingly difficult, this will not stand. Further, their culture of hostility to the West and general narcissism has created a new breed of nobility that feels no obligation to the people over whom they rule. It is a power structure that necessarily must be broken.

[sunskyfan]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

The solution seems easy to me. Couple a university's ability to generate student loans now to the default rate and earnings rate of pass graduates. Hum. Kind of like what a bank use to be. What a concept coupling past performance with access to capital. That should close the loop pretty fast. Will this discourage loans to the poor? Maybe. But we now have a baseline from the past to look at so this would be a feed forward process at least ethically. Frankly I think we should make general education free with specialization foci bearing the cost. That would create an educated population but enable economic discrimination between success and failure of choices.

[shiny!]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

A young person can get a 2-year degree from a good Vocational College for a fraction of the cost of a Bachelor's or Master's degree, and graduate with skills that are in high demand.

I think American education went all wrong when we dropped vocational tracks from High Schools and started the "every child deserves a college education" nonsense. How many MBA's do we really need? Not all people are cut out for academia and that's OK, but it's politically incorrect to say so.

My air conditioner died last weekend. I needed a new one immediately (Phoenix + Summer - A/C = Death). I did not need an economist, an architect, a geologist or a historian. I needed a team of refrigeration techs who got their training at a Vocational school, and I was damn glad to have them! These guys make good money and they deserve every cent of it.

We need to encourage vocational trades and apprenticeship programs again.

[rdrees]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

I agree that the government subsidy issue is a major problem for universities, particularly private ones.

Private universities are for-profit institutions and they make handsome profits at that. A vastly expanding pool of "left-over" or "extra" cash, known in academia as an endowment, are its profits, and fundamentally no different from the vast pool of cash Microsoft sits on.

And yet, in what is perhaps the biggest government subsidy of them all, these private universities are treated like charities and do not have to pay any taxes whatsoever. They can raise their rates (tuition), roll around in their profits (endowments), put up their employees in fancy houses (faculty housing), and do all of this without paying a single cent in taxes, nor otherwise being held to account for basic business regulations that all other for-profit entities are.

Why in the world our tax code treats Harvard, which charges its customers over $50,000 per year for tuition, room, and board, the same as the Salvation Army, which gives away money and services to the poor, is completely beyond me. Indeed, because universities are treated as charities, not only can they generate vast profits tax-free, people can give money to them and deduct it from their taxes as well. Not to mention that the government subsidizes the customers (students and their parents) to borrow as much as possible to pay the $50,000 yearly price with loan guarantees. And don't get me started on the vast amounts of money generated by collegiate sports programs on the back of freely provided labor (college athletes).

I'm all for encouraging higher education in our country, but the sheer amount and number of these subsidies have completely distorted the system. Institutions of higher education have abused these incentives and instead of using the money that flows to them to keep costs down, instead has sat on huge piles of money while raising their prices ever and ever higher.

Private colleges provide a service for a price. They should generally be treated like any other business that provides a service for a price, with educational incentives operating only on the margins.

[reggie]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

Gatto, a former NY School Teacher of the Year, always seems to be one who provides keen insight into the issue of schooling. Here's one of many Youtubes, followed by the text of a speech found in his book: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.

This speech was given by the author on 31 January 1990 in accepting an award from the New York State Senate naming him New York City Teacher of the Year.

I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who were never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine what the word "education" should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around (those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered), but she or he is a standard-bearer, representative of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

1 .

We live in a time of great school crisis linked to an even greater social crisis. Our nation ranks at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world's narcotic economy is based upon our consumption of this commodity; if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world, and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan, seventy percent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.

This great crisis which we witness in our schools is interlinked with a greater social crisis in the community. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent; nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life; a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. School is a major actor in this tragedy, as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and who sleep upon the streets.

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching: that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools, as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic; it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

2 .

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent, and after it the figure never exceeded ninety-one percent, where it stands in 1990.

Here is another curiosity to think about. The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

3.

1 don't think we'll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, though it does not "educate;" that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and by some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but in a national order increasingly disintegrated, in a national order in which the only "successful" people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic (because community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead and only networks remain), the products of schooling are, as I've said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.

The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that, as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago, we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.

It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its "homework."

"How will they learn to read?" you ask, and my answer is "Remember the lessons of Massachusetts." When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.

But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the "basics" anymore because they really aren't basic to the society we've made.

4.

Two institutions at present control our children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.

But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:

Out of the 168 hours in each week my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.

According to recent reports children watch 55 hours of television a week. That then leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.

My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 8 hours getting ready for and traveling to and from school, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time they are under constant surveillance. They have no private time or private space and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves them 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course my kids eat, too, and that takes some time - not much because they've lost the tradition of family dining - but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours per week.

It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, of course, the less television he or she watches, but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly prescribed by a somewhat broader catalogue of commercial entertainments and the inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his or her own choice.

But these activities are just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons have a lot to do with it.

Think of the phenomena which are killing us as a nation - narcotic drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, and alcohol, and the worst pornography of all: lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy -all of these are addictions of dependent personalities, and this is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.

5.

I want to tell you what the effect on our children is of taking all their time from them - time they need to grow up - and forcing them to spend it on abstractions.You need to hear this because any reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be nothing more than a facade.

1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants children to grow up these days, least of all the children: and who can blame them? Toys are us.

2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity, and what little they do have is transitory. They cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?

3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they live in a continuous present, the exact moment they are in is the boundary of their consciousness.

4. The children I teach are ahistorical; they have no sense of how the past has predestinated their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.

5. The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune; they laugh at weakness: they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.

6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy; so intimate relationships have to be avoided.

7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade everything' and television mentors who offer everything in the world for sale.

8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This timidity is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness, but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

I could name a few other conditions that school reform will have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television has, or both. It's a simple matter of arithmetic - between schooling and television, all the time the children have is eaten up. There simply isn't enough other time in the experience of our kids for there to be other significant causes.

6.

What can be done?

First, we need a ferocious national debate that doesn't quit, day after day, year after year, the kind of continuous debate that journalism finds boring. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of home-schooling shows a different road that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into schooling back into family education might cure two ailments with one medicine, repairing families as it repairs children.

Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn't cost anything. More money and more people pumped into this sick institution will only make it sicker. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For 140 years this nation has tiled to impose objectives downward from a lofty command center made up of "experts," a central elite of social engineers. It hasn't worked. It won't work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato's republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before our eyes; our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn't work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, antihuman, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology: drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach.

7.

It's high time we looked backwards to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching, as much, that is, as I can get away with, given the present institution of compulsory schooling. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.

At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements that work to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or malting it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.

Right now we are taking from our children all the time that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back. We need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school, but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curricula where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.

A short time ago I took $70 and sent a twelve-year-old girl from my class, with her non-English-speaking mother, on a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of Seabright to lunch and apologize for polluting his beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the police chief for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in small town police procedures. A few days later two more of my twelve-year-old kids traveled alone from Harlem to West Thirty-first street where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor; later three of my kids found themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at six in the morning, studying the mind of a trucking company president as he dispatched eighteen-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Are these "special" children in a "special" program? Well, in one sense yes, but nobody knows about this program but myself and the kids. They're just nice kids from central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them couldn't add or subtract with any fluency. And not a single one knew the population of New York City or how far New York is from California.

Does that worry me? Of course; but I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge they'll also become self-teachers - and only self-teaching has any lasting value.

We've got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can be spent on something other than abstraction. This is an emergency; it requires drastic action to correct.

8.

What else does a restructured school system need? It needs to stop being a parasite on the working community. Of all the pages in the human ledger, only our tortured country has warehoused children and asked nothing of them in service of the general good. For a while I think we need to make community service a required part of schooling. Besides the experience in acting unselfishly that it will teach, it is the quickest way to give young children real responsibility in the mainstream of life.

For five years I ran a guerrilla school program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give 320 hours a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years later, grown up, and told me that the experience of helping someone else had changed their lives. It had taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were thirteen, in my Lab School program, and was only possible because my rich school district was in chaos. When "stability" returned, the Lab closed. It was too successful with a widely mixed group of kids, at too small a cost, to be allowed to continue.

Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one-day variety or longer - these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of "school to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents - and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.

The "Curriculum of Family" is at the heart of any good life. We've gotten away from that curriculum; it's time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during schooltime confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief.

I have many ideas for formulating a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you have many ideas, too. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grassroots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large, vested interests preempting all the air time and profiting from schooling as it is, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We've all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press; a decade-long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more "expert" opinions. Experts in education have never been right; their "solutions" are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. We've seen the results.

If s time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family.

[shiny!]

Re: NYTimes article: Academic Bankruptcy

John Gatto is one of my heroes. Thanks for posting that.