When I was taking a directed studies class as an econ major, one of my quasi socialist professors insisted we also read Milton Friedman to balance things out.
One thing that struck me was that Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition) supported general liberal education by a country of its citizens. While Brigham Young wasn’t supportive of public education (he felt that free education lost its value and did not like taxes) he supported liberal arts education. People tend to forget that the Salt Lake Theatre was built before the Salt Lake Temple.
In times of shrinking budgets, it is easy to forget that skills training, the things that go into teaching a trade or a profession, can be financed by charging people for it. But liberal education, those things that bind us together with common values, common culture, and common meaning, is something that many, from Brigham Young to Milton Friedman have endorsed as essential to the health of a nation.
Who do you think said:
What about:
Who attempted to create a university to provide free education, which he felt should require of each student both liberal education and a trade?
What do you think about education in today’s economic and political climate? Is there a place for liberal arts education? Should I forget about political posts and go back to other topics?
Wheat & Tares 
Long live the liberal arts education! Not only will they bind us together with common culture and values, but learning them will teach us to think critically, to analyze thoroughly and to communicate clearly.
And Warren Buffet endorsed it as an important way to educate the type of people he wanted to hire.
can you share the quote of Brigham Young decrying public education and taxes?
As far as the rest, pretty much agree with you that liberal education is vital to the progress of our country.
Stephen-
A few thoughts:
1. Personally, and I may do a post on this, if I had to choose one thing to share with the world, or one improvement I could make, that would change the world in the most positive way, it would absolutely be education. I very strongly support education as the means by which we can overcome so many of the world’s problems, from social and moral issues, to poverty and hunger.
2. I very much lament the status of education in our country. I don’t think public schooling, as implemented in the U.S. right now, works, and the proof is in the pudding. In math, engineering, and science particularly, the very things that could help cure hunger, disease, provide safety, etc. we suck! Not to say that we don’t still lead the world in those categories at the professional level, but it’s no thanks to public education. Additionally, we simply must find a solution to the correlation between poverty and low education. The correlation has nothing to do with the capability of those in that situation. We need to find the cause and fix it.
3. In terms of politics of public education, I think as long as we continue to look to gov’t to solve the problem, we will be disappointed. Gov’t can’t do everything, and it already does too much IMHO. I’d like to see more widespread adoption at local levels of the kinds of solutions presented in the documentary “Waiting on Superman.”
4. Great post Stephen, no need to change your strategies on posting unless you want to. The political posts from Hawk and I have ruffled lots of feathers, but I’m still hopeful we each can keep our wits about us and compassionately discuss the issues, and when in doubt, give the benefit of that doubt to our peers who we ought to assume are intelligent beings.
“he felt that free education lost its value and did not like taxes”
Truer words have never been spoken. The best decision I have ever made was taking my kids out of public school and putting them in private school – they say prayers, they recite the constitution, they actually teach Math, English and Science; and, most of all teachers are fired if they don’t perform. The difference is absolutely night and day.
The three R’s in the public school are tolerance for racism, recycling and uninhibited reproduction – a far cry from what they should be learning.
Our daughter has experienced about every type of education, from Methodist nursery school to public school, to a German-based private educational approach, to home schooling using a curriculum developed for the families of American diplomats living overseas, to home schooling using an entirely different curriculum, to community college education during high school, to graduate on-line study.
Granted, home schooling is easier when one parent has a graduate degree in the sciences and the other has a graduate degree in the arts, but critical thinking seems to us to have been LEAST likely to develop in the public school environment.
In the classroom there are too many demands and too little time to really focus on the needs and gifts of the individual students, and large increases in money over the decades seem to be swallowed up in professional career-building exercises without reaching into student achievement.
Like jmb, I’d also recommend people seriously consider the reforms in the documentary “Waiting for Superman” for public schools.
I hope LDS in particular, who expect mothers to nurture the children (whether you agree with that traditional role or not), should be certain that all women are as fully educated as possible.
I’m happy to say that I work as a teacher in a network of charter schools built around a solid and mandatory liberal arts curriculum. My little sixth and seventh grade students greatly admire the juniors (those who started as 8th graders when the school opened), as do I. They can draw, paint, monologue, read music, sing, differentiate and integrate, draw force diagrams, read the weather, and seriously discuss a huge corpus of western philosophy and literature, beginning to develop a sense of what it means to be human in the process.
Sure, these kids could be wonderful cogs in factories or cubicle farms (as the Prussian education model followed by the US public school system intends), but they’re far more than that. They know how to think, but they also know much of what has been thought before, and so have a bit of wisdom. My network isn’t trying to produce great minds only, as the name indicates: Great Hearts Academies.
I don’t know what public school y’all went to as kids, but it seems those schools succeeded in instilling in all y’all some pretty good smarts.
Maybe the problem with today’s education system is not the teachers, nor the administrators, nor the public school districts. Maybe parents have become too lax with their children’s education. Maybe children are waaaaaaay too distracted by technology to grasp intuitive creativity. My wife is a principal of a public school in New York City. She has a game night for her kids about every month. They bring in their favorite shoot-em-up games on Playstation 3 or Xbox360. You need to see it to believe just how sharp these kids are with those games. It’s second nature to them. Maybe there is a reason why today’s kids are not doing as well in school as we would like them to do, and those reasons are not even at all related to the time they spend in a classroom.
My daughters have gone to excellent public schools. Better than most private schools. Just FYI.
Otherwise, sorry I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with other issues, so have not had time to contribute more to this thread.
On another blog I started by referencing a belief of the late educator Neil Postman who said what you need in education is a “good crap detector.” I am afraid some of the people who responded appeared to have had a detector malfunction when they saw Waiting for Superman.
Please read on the internet Diane Ravitch’s article in the November 10,2010 New York Review of Books entitled “The myth of Charter Schools.” She simply destroys much, if not most, of the assumptions and arguments of this film. Instead of rehashing her article, I would like to focus on three other points.
First, there are very effective public and charter schools. The key is finding what makes them effective and then determine if can you replicate it. For example, one of the schools that “works” in the film is a boarding school, a choice where there is not enough money available in publicly funded school system.
Second, beware of propaganda. Statistics are often abused as both public and charter schools try to manipulate test results (my personal favorite is a school that used to send its poorest performing students on field trips on test day). Remember also, a number of for profit charters have slick brochures created by people who also earn money by writing the ads for hair restoration products.
Third, I don’t know whether to call this a thirty year teacher’s reflection or a cynics guide to educational reform: If some one proposes a new reform you will not have the money to do it and beside there is no research to show if it actually works, but do not worry it will return ten years later with a new name and a new guru.
I do not know how many presentations I sat through where my crap detector went off big time. When a teacher would ask for data to back up a program, we would get a song and dance. If asked where we could see the program in action in a school like ours, they always seemed to be three states away.
In simple terms, before you buy into a supposed reform make sure there is not only independent data and studies that supports it but that it actually can be observed (certainly not a well intentioned but seriously flawed movie).
well said Stan. The Academy of Motion Pictures did well in not nominating Waiting for Superman for Best Documentary. Maybe Best Propaganda.
Here is Diane Ravitch’s scathing review, btw. Worth as much of a read as paying $3 to rent Waiting for Superman.
I think a huge thing is parent involvement in making a school a good school.
But then I consider physics and calculus part of a liberal education too.
Ok, I’ve seen that, realize it segues into a critique of Waiting for Superman but I’m not sure what that has to do with the issue of the core value of liberal education in a free society?
and
I find that good support/parents tends to attract better teachers to a school. There has not been a good study of that corollary, which, I submit, results in under-valuing good teachers.
Though I see Diane Ravitch’s points made all to the time in support of the argument that teachers are overpaid. I just don’t think that is necessarily so.
Stan,
Exactly. Education reform movements are rarely effective, either because they’re too dependent on certain people or institutions or because the curricula they produce aren’t well matched to students, instructors, or both. I spent several years in Lillian McDermott’s Physics Education Group at the University of Washington, and I highly recommend her Millikan Lecture from 1990:
Click to access McDermott_MillikanAward_AJP1991.pdf
Her Oersted Medal Lecture from 2001 describes in greater detail how things are done in the UW Department of Physics:
Click to access AJP001127.pdf
Admittedly, that’s all in the context of teaching physics (which I will teach next year), but some of the principles will readily generalize to education in other fields.
give poor kids food and shelter, and they’ll do better in school. provide a stable home life and they’ll excel regardless of who is teaching them.
Should we be conflating education with a liberal education? Seems to me there’s a gap there. And what on earth do we mean by a liberal education anyway? Surely we don’t mean the same thing it has meant in the past…
Also exactly who is opposed to education? I don’t know of anyone.
Regarding Brigham Young it’s interesting that he didn’t just want people to get a liberal education but also a scientific one as well as practical skills like a trade as was understood in that era. (Blacksmith, carpentry, etc.) (That’s from Arrington’s BY bio on page 368 but I can’t seem to find the cite of the original site anywhere in the book)
Dan, I think there’s certainly a lot more bang for the buck in improving the home life for troubled kids than in improving teachers. I’m not at all convinced this will make kids “excel” – at best it would mean some of the negatives of certain demographics are eliminated.
“give poor kids food and shelter, and they’ll do better in school. provide a stable home life and they’ll excel regardless of who is teaching them.”
And you keep this mentality and eventually you’ll be 14 trillion in debt.
So I guess it’s a better option to quit spending any money on education. In fact, if we have no government, then there’s no need to worry about government debt, right? Anarchy is the real solution to all this. Government is the problem for everything, right Will?
We only need to teach them correct principles and govern themselves. We need no government.
Clearly big Government has resulted in big debt. The answer is limited government, with limited debt. If I had an employee who failed on every task I had given them, I certinately wouldn’t give them more responsibility. Big Government’s failure speaks for it’s self.
Clark,
There’s a lot of bluster in the education debate in our country. Our education system “sucks” apparently. Thus, the counter is that if we improve poverty-stricken kids, they’ll “excel.” 🙂
What I mean is that we are competitive with other countries in the world in terms of education. We’re not so far off the field as to “suck” but we could definitely do better. If we reduce our poverty rate from 20% down to 5%, I think we would see a dramatic rise in the education of our children and our numbers would more reflect those of Korea and Finland. We have a pretty good educational system in America, despite what the critics say. I say that as one married to a principal of a new small school in New York City (part of Mayor Bloomberg’s initiative to reduce class and school size). My wife runs a fairly good school (the city recently rated her school “well developed”), but you can see the problems quite dramatically when comparing her school (which has only about 300 students at this point) with the older, bigger school in the same building. That school takes in vastly more poor kids, and is having a hard time graduating 46% of its students. That school institution does have structural problems and is slated to be shut down (over great protest—it is one of the oldest high schools in the city and has quite a history). It does however, cater to a large predominantly poor African American community. The point Ms. Ravich makes is that if all schools were to get the kind of funding Mr. Canada gets in Harlem, they’d all do much better (though not perfect, as even Mr. Canada has major problems at his Harlem schools). The ironic part of the debate right now over education here is that those critical of our system refuse to fix the real problem (poverty) and refuse to fund schools and teachers better.
As for what liberal education means, I think it is to teach progressivism and the evils of modern conservatism. 😉
Clearly Will has no idea what he is talking about. Surely Will has a deep hatred of Ronald Reagan…
Clark — click on the links, it will take you to someone citing to Brigham Young on that exact point 😉
I love how the response to someone who doesn’t see things the same as you is either to call them stupid, ignorant, or gullible. The end goal (which was all I commented on) in “Waiting on Superman” is not charter schools, or private schools. The end goal and method for success was individualized attention, and refusing to allow students to fail. Infrastructure built around those two goals are what led to success.
Re Dan
Either that or we succeeded despite our public education!
I don’t mean to be cynical, and I don’t think all public schooling is bad. In fact, public universities are often very successful. It’s not the fact that they’re public that makes them bad, so I don’t want to turn this into a pro-gov’t vs. anti-gov’t debate. My daughter attends a public elementary school that is considered very good, even in my very liberal and education oriented city.
For my own experience, I went to what I suspect is an average elementary school, junior high school, and probably a below average high school. I had some good teachers and those teachers had a HUGE impact on my life. They were brilliant at their job. But when I got to college, it was clear I was ill-prepared for what was in store for me. It took me until the end of my BS to really develop any critical thinking skills. Since then I’ve been very successful in my career. I really appreciate the good teachers in my life and it’s in part thanks to them I’m where I’m at now. But I’m not going to pretend that the majority of my teachers were good, or that my schools were responsible for my success.
Personally, I think the stable home life is one of the most important things, but I don’t think even that’s necessarily a recipe for success.
Here’s the thing, in math and science, we “suck” (see here) Perhaps not third world country “suck” but it’s pretty bad (though perhaps this isn’t really “liberal education” so maybe I shouldn’t be talking about it). As I said, at the university level, and the professional level, in math and science, there’s no question the U.S. is the best there is. Students from all over the world (but mostly from Asia) come to our universities to study in scientific and technical fields, but most of our patents and half our degrees don’t go to Americans.
Part of this has nothing to do with schooling, but with Americans’ attitude. See here (warning PDF). We have a culture that thinks of science and math as nerdy and/or too hard. People have no problem commenting on abstract liberal ideas that are subjective in nature since any opinion is valid. But when it comes to a technical discussion, people bail out. Part of a well-rounded education has to include mathematics, science, engineering, and probability. But I know college educated people who don’t know what a derivative or integral is. And the basics of how a computer works? Well, just forget that. It’s pathetic!
Overall, my impression is that too many people don’t want to concern themselves with the details of any particular subject because it’s too hard, they might realize it’s not as simple as they thought, or it might threaten their ideals/beliefs. Since science, math, and engineering are ALL details, people avoid it like the plague!
::stepping down from soapbox now::
Stephen – they have the link to the BY bio but my point was Arrington doesn’t appear to have a site for what I quoted.
jmb275 – we suck as a country but if you look at most suburban schools we do quite well. Not as well as I think we could but I think that indicates that the issue is home life and parental support more than teachers. Now I disagree with Dan that teachers don’t matter that much. I think they do and I think there’s a lot more to school than these test scores. So while Charter schools don’t do significantly better on average in test scores, for instance, there are other facets they do better on. Obviously graduation rates is the big one that is bandied about but I think providing more incentives for a particular type of education (say science, music, civics, etc.) is also extremely valuable and perhaps a tad harder to quantify in the way the debate attempts to.
jmb,
Well I lucked out in finding a group of people who somehow all appear on the same blog who happened to have succeeded despite their public school education…what are the chances. 😉
Now again, I’m not sure I understand how we “suck” at education. I believe that if we were to take a regular guy from here and meet him up with a regular guy from Germany and a regular guy from Japan and let them converse, neither of the three is going to feel left out because they lacked certain knowledge. Using such stark terms undermines the problems we do have to deal with because it overplays what the problems are. I sucked at chemistry for instance in high school, not because my teacher didn’t know his stuff or even present it well, but because I started tuning it out due to lack of interest. However, AP English I got an A in because I found it highly compelling. I think that for the most part our teachers are well trained and well educated and to reiterate once more, and the last time, poverty is our biggest hurdle.
Dan:
Yeah, but I don’t count because I was in college by Vietnam. Not the same public school system at all.
Firetag,
And you would know this because you still go to school? 😉
Realistically though, what changed so that the public school system before Vietnam was something—in your words—not at all like it became after Vietnam? Did the military secretly inject every American with a “get dumber” drug?
:Stephen – they have the link to the BY bio but my point was Arrington doesn’t appear to have a site for what I quoted.:
I’ll be, I’ve seen it an awful lot of times through the years. I’ll have to keep an eye out to see if I can find a solid citation.
Dan:
Comment 6 describes my post-Vietnam educational experience, getting my daughter from K to PhD. She now runs a science learning center at one of the largest community colleges around and located in one of the richest counties in the country. There is a BIG difference in the problems she sees within the county. Far too many resources in the county go to preparing children of semi-elites in the richer parts of the county for entry into the class of their parents, and far too little on the schools in the less trendy parts of the county. (The real elites, of course, escape public school entirely.)
Yeah, I think everyone is just quoting Arrington. (Indeed I’ve seen some prominent websites quoting Arrington but not signifying they are quoting him – there’s one from Utah State that surprised me)
Firetag,
Interesting indeed. How exactly would the push for decentralization ensure poor areas get similar, if not more, funding? Methinks that to get us to compete with Finland, that sort of money ought to go to places where no one really wants to send it…
Neither centralization nor decentralization “ensure” poor areas get more funding — which is NOT equivalent to resources, by the way. That was the point that large increases in funding have not produced improvement.
Parents want the best for their own children. Suppliers of services for children — present idealistic company excepted — are likely to be as greedy as anyone else, and want the best for themselves. If I can accumulate more wealth or political power in a given system, I’m likely to be tempted to put other people’s children second to my own. We see that in nearby DC where school unions fought tooth and nail against voucher systems that were favored my the majority of African Americans in DC.
Monopolistic corporations and monopolistic governments tend to act EXACTLY the same way — they just use a different currency.
Just so everyone is on the same page (and I’m sorry if this comes off as pompous, I really don’t mean to be a jerk)
Liberal Arts = Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music, Geometry
Fine Arts = Two Dimensional Work (Painting, Drawing, etc.), Sculpture, Conceptual Art, Dance, Theater, Film, Architecture.
Clark and Stephen M alluded to this difference, but some comments (and perhaps the OP – with its comparison of the Salt Lake Theater with “Liberal Arts Education”) seemed to need this clarification.
B.Russ, I’m the OP, just logging in from a different computer.
Poverty is big problem in this country and throughout the world, in places like…Asia, where education seems to be excelling.
Look, poverty is a problem but it is not THE problem related to education. THE problem doesn’t exist because there are a multitude of issues that affect education, and those issues differ from region to region.
That said, If I had to choose one problem that has the most influence on the quality of a child’s eduction, it wouldn’t be poverty. It wouldn’t be the type of school (private, public, charter). It wouldn’t even be home life. It would be choice of friends.
Bishop Rick — you make an excellent point. The poverty that affects education is a side effect of families that are not intact and other non-functional adult behaviors that leak over onto children, as well as socialization issues.
Money does not always help that, many times it just enables it further.
39 – Yeah, that occured to me after I posted. But I guess I’m still confused why the Salt Lake Theatre is related to a Liberal Arts education.
I don’t trust government to run my church neither would I trust it to “educate” my children.
I now call “public education” gunvernment propaganda machine. My brother-in-law has a teacher who has them all writing their state legislature to get schools more stolen money from the populace. How is that not propaganda?
As for home schooling, you don’t need a Ph.D. to teach a child. I know a mother in a town north of me that has a population of ~3,000 people that home schooled her children. All of them are now happy, productive adults. One now has a Ph.D. as a pianist another is in school as an engineer and is at the top of his class, another is a nurse, another is a homemaker. They all have self confidence and are experiencing self actualization. Apparently you don’t even need a parent at home or have two parents, for that matter, to home school.
As for the liberal education. I agree that kids should take logic classes, learn history, learn arts and crafts, learn theater, learn science. They don’t need to enjoy each one of those but should at least have an introduction to it. I really enjoyed classes that had nothing to do with my engineering degree.
As for the poor and learning check out the book “The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves”. I haven’t read it yet but it’s supposed to be pretty good. I can’t wait until I get a chance to read it.
There is also a method called unschooling. I became tired of the engineering field and am currently reeducating myself in computer science. It’s the greatest independent study program I’ve ever been through. It’s great to be able to sit down and read through and practice what I’m learning. Sometimes it would be nice to have a mentor but for the most part computer science is still a free educational area. No licensing needed and if you free lance you don’t need the piece of paper to say you can do the work. Programmers also compete against cheaper labor from over seas, yet still manage to hold their own.