Last week I went and spoke at Career Day at Las Lomas High School here in Walnut Creek, discussing my jet set lifestyle as a web developer. I thoroughly expected to walk in there and be faced by a bunch of slack-jawed, cybersavvy youths who’d totally school me in the ways of modern web building and roll their eyes when I tried to explain what an HTML tag was.
What floored me was just how totally, totally wrong I was. I did three sessions with about 15 students each. I started each session by asking how many of them had web sites. Not too surprisingly, only a couple of hands shot up in each session. I figured that, what with Blogger, LiveJournal and all those other companies dominating the blog hosting sphere, few would actually say they had their own site. What really, really surprised me, though, was how many said they had blogs - fewer than those who said they had sites! I genuinely expected to see practically every hand shoot up on that one.
Las Lomas is a pretty good school, from my understanding. It’s considered to be the poorest school in its district but, when you consider the district it’s in, that’s like saying someone is the poorest millionaire you know. Despite this, though, they only have one web class, which apparently only teaches basic HTML and, according to one student I spoke to, is more like a study hall with computers rather than an actual class.
This really bothers me for a number of reasons. The web is definitely not a fad. Not only has it survived for more than ten years and grown by enormous amounts, it has evolved and become even more ubiquitous thanks to mobile technology and WiFi networking. We’re rapidly reaching a point when web literacy will matter almost as much as language literacy. And, while not everyone in the workplace needs to know HTML, the resources for students interested in pursuing a career in technology need to be in place to ensure that they have the tools to best compete in the world marketplace. I read not too long ago that the public school system was established using a model heavily influenced by industrial giants such as Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan intended to generate a populace just educated enough to work in the factories that drove their industries. This struck me as a rather cynical look at public education but, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. And this lack of technical education would seem to further this idea.
Whenever I’ve seen a computer or electronics class at a high school, they’ve always been more of the vocational rather than creatively educational variety. Students learn how to wire circuits or take someone else’s ideas and make them work. they’re not really taught how to make original works themselves. This is true for pretty much every class in public high schools, in fact. This, to me, is a fundamental flaw in our educational system that, year after year, graduates thousands of non-creative, non-original automatons suitable for the workplace but not for innovation.
The argument I hear is that, if I want my kids to get this valuable, creative education I’m dreaming about, I should pony up for private school. Horse shit. That’s raw elitism at its worst. What this says to me is that only those who can afford the high cost of private tuition can expect their children to get a valuable education that will allow them to create rather than simply replicate. Never mind that in every brain their exists the potential for someone truly unique and wonderful. Our nation is becoming complacent and stagnant in the global marketplace. Today, we’re seeing countries like India take center stage in areas which we once dominated. At the moment, India is where we send our technological work to be done. Right now, we do most of the innovating and they do the implementing. This would seem to be a good thing for us, except we’re not innovating like we used to and, thanks to our generosity in educating inexpensive Indian labor in the fine points of technology for pennies on the dollar, they’re beginning to pick up our slack. Most of the great technological advances are no longer coming from our space program or our superior military research - they’re coming from overseas, from Europe, Asia and places like India that, not so long ago, we had written off as too third world to be considered much of a force.
Laws that make it more difficult or expensive to send jobs overseas will do no good. Becoming an isolationist nation would be far more detrimental to our common welfare than the current state of outsourced jobs. The lack of innovation in our nation stems not from looking outside for aid, but from not fostering the genius that lies within our own borders. It behooves us to truly pour money and resources into our public school system and, if necessary, tear it down to the foundations and start over. We should be producing a nation of great thinkers, not mediocre tinkerers. Organizations like our local Walnut Creek Education Foundation, which raises funds to support the programs the state considers non-vital, like art and music, are fighting to change the system. But, without the support of our government and, yes, our taxpayers, their efforts can’t go far enough. And what of the schools where such organizations aren’t possible due to poverty or lack of resources?
If the bureaucracy wastes school funds, fix it. If the teachers are ineffective and jaded, replace them with intelligent, vibrant new ones. And if they demand salaries that are commensurate with their skills, then by God find the money to compensate them. All the whining and whinging and wringing of hands is killing this nation’s place in the world as a dominant intellectual force. And if the kids are too caught up in their drama and hormone to be engaged in their own education, try a different approach. I refuse to believe the system is broken beyond repair and I refuse to believe that our kids don’t care about their own education - if I could find an efficient way to tap that youthful exuberance I could change the world with almost no effort. All of the resources are there, we just need to find a way to put them together so that they work.
