[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Mike Meredith]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:13:52 -0400, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> Public school education these days:
> 
> 3. A way to force people to accept, even expect, drudgery in their 
> future jobs.

There's people who argue that public education has always been like
that. Or worse.

One thing about the quality of teaching though ... if you pay peanuts
then you'll get monkeys. I'm sure there are some brilliant teachers out
there; after all I know some personally. However if you want the best,
you have to pay for it and teaching has been for a long time a badly
paid profession ... at least as far back as WWII in the UK (just
finished re-reading Anthony Burgess's first part of his autobiography
where he moans about poor pay for teachers).

> I was talking to a pastor, asking him which Bible translations he 
> recommends in addition to the KJV.  He made the point that in the
> 1950s the average vocabulary was 10,000 words for high school
> graduates.  Now it is 4,000 words.  KJV requires a vocabulary of (I

It is a little too easy to glorify the education systems of the past.
We might get a very different picture by comparing the average
vocabulary of all 18 year old students in 1950 and 2006. At least in
the UK, the education system used to be very split between the
majority trained to work on the factory floor and a small minority
trained to do something requiring a little more education. 

> Bottom line:  the rest of you are all a lot dumber than me 
> ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a lot dumber than previous generations.

I'm more ignorant than you ... not dumber :)


-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  ... indeed, there is something vaguely dishonourable in having lived
  through the sixties without having spent time in jail
  --HST