Hildegarde

First, to answer Cheryl’s question–a propriety school is a school that’s run for profit, like a business.

Most private colleges and universities in the  United States are non-profit corporations.  They aren’t expected to make money for anybody.  They don’t pay dividends.  And they’re not fly by nights.  Many of them–the big names like Harvard, Yale, Amherst,  Vassar, but also smaller places like  St.  Olaf’s and Kenyon–have been around for over a hundred years.  They have endowments that help them keep running, but they do not ever need to show that they’ve made money, nor do they usually do that.

Proprietary schools, on hte other hand, are businesses just like GM and Microsoft.  They exist to make a profit, and they do that by running their offerings on a business model.  Even a small college like Kenyon supports a number of faculty members whose entire focus is research, because the disinterested pursuit of knowledge is what it is they’re supposed to be doing.  A proprietary school supports no such faculty members, because for them it would be pointless.  They’re in business to deliver a service and make money from it.

And as businessnes, they lack some of the constraints of their non-profit competitors.  For instance, Harvard and Yale must deal with rules on the hiring and tenure of faculty laid down by the AAUP.  Phoenix can hire pretty much everybody piecemeal and part time and avoid all that. 

But what I really want to get to is Robert’s contention that:

>>>There seems to be an implicit assumption that schools hire high schol or college graduates because they have certain skills, that the students need or want to aquire these skills, and that the schools are threatened when they don’t educate the students. This is true–over in the schools of Chemistry, Engineering, Medicine and a number of others. But they’re doing fine.
The crisis seems to be among students looking for a job which requires “any four-year degree” the employers who hire such, and the faculty of the “fuzzy science” end of the Humanities. >>>

Let me try to untangle this for a couple of minutes.

First, I think that students and their parents think that students are in schools to acquire skills that employers want them to have.  This is not the purpose of a college education, h owever, and it never was.  There is a fundamental mismatch here between the institutions and what they’re being used for.

The English department in a research-level university or high-end liberal arts college does not exist to teach its students how to write.   In fact, it’s a fair guess that there will be nobody on the faculty of such a department who would know how to go about doing that.  Professors of English are trained in the intellectual history of prose in English, and that’s what they teach.

The assumption that colleges and universities will teach composition is fairly new.  It arose in the last twenty or thirty years, at the point at which we could no longer asume that the students coming into higher education had already learned that in elementary and high school. 

I’m with Robert.  The persuasive essay and the reesearch paper are subjects for eighth grade English, whose teachers are supposed to be trained to teach just that.  But outside of honors courses or gifted programs, we no longer teach that then, or in high school, for the simple reason that if we insisted on such a standard too many people would fail.

That said, as far as I can tell, Mary F, who actually has to hire liberal arts graduates, is having a good time with them.   They have the communications skills she needs.  But I do think they have those things not because they were taught them in college courses, but because the fact that they’d managed to make it through four years of a good university meant that they were more likely than people who didn’t have that background to have acquired those skills along the way.

It’s useless to rail at the “fuzzy scienes” and the Humanities for not teaching students how to read and write, for the same reason it’s useless to rail at the Chemistry department for not teaching people how to draw and play the flute–those things are not what the Chemistry department is meant to teach.

But the fact is that the people who have the most problems with reading and writing are very unlikely to be majoring in the fuzzy sciences or the Humanities–they’re going to be majoring in various kinds of business (marketing, management, human resources), or in majors that have been concocted from whole cloth over the last decade or so, like “criminal justice,” “equine management” and “pre-law.” 

These are the kids in the bottom half of the achievement/ability distribution, not the kids who go on to  Vassar and Northwestern.  They were unlikely to be in honors or AP classes in high school, or they went to the kind of high schools where such classes, although a significant improvement over the standard offerings, were so watered down vis a vis the AP offered in good schools that they made very little difference.

Robert asks how people can gain sufficient context to read well if they don’t read for pleasure, and the answer is–quite easily, if the schools they go to are providing it.  Lots of people who read very well indeed never read for pleasure, and a fair number of people who read for pleasure seem to have very little context.   That’s who buys all those Chicken Soup for the Soul books.

Schools used to provide their students with context through continual reinforcement–history class was careful to cover the Boston tea party, the Civil  War and the bombing of Pearl Harbor; English class read Longfellow, Thoreau and Faulkner and visited those same events as a side issue.  Etc.

This is the premis behind E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy project, which has been adopted (with significant success, by the way) by charter and private schools all over the country.  Kindergarten children do little plays about the First Thanksgiving.   Middle school children read the story of Miles Standish. Junior high school students read Washington Irving.  High school students read The Scarlet Letter and The Red Badge of Courage.   Everything works together.  The general knowledge I’m talking about becomes literally part of the landscape, things students know without remembering where they first heard them and without being aware of consciously studying them.  

Does doing things this way insure that every student will acquire the necessary context?

No. 

It never did.  We most certainly insisted on the persuasive essay and the research paper in eighth grade–but we did it in while we allowed far more students to flunk out and leave school.

The problem, I think, is that we’ve defined “everybody should have a high school education” as “everybody should have a high school diploma.”   The two things are not the same.

If we insisted on adhering to the same standards that defined a high school education  in 1945, we would almost certainly see a lot fewer people graduate from high school.

If we insisted on adhering to the same standards that defined a college education in 1945, we’d have to close the huge network of lower-level state schools that have arisen essentially in an attempt to provide high-school-level skills to the kids who know have the diplomas without the skills because we’ve dumbed down the high school program to allow them to graduate.

And while we’ve been doing that, we’ve been dumbing down the skills levels even for a lot of the kids who would have graduated under the old system, because keeping up appearances–pretending not to be doing what we are in fact doing–has meant making sure it isn’t too obvious that “honors” mean “a whole different universe.”

What I would do, if it was up to me, would be to set the standards back to where they were at the end of the Second World War, and then allow any student who wanted to to give them a shot.  I wouldn’t allow schools to sort students beforehand–oh, you’re not college material, you take shop.   That decision should be up to the student.

But it should also be the case that if the kid fails, he fails.  The standard should be what it is.  The kid should get to try it as often as he wants.  But if he can’t do it, then it makes sense to acknowledge that he can’t do it.

What we’ve got now is a kind of hat trick.  We declare thatwe’ve made so much progreess–so many more people graduate from high school than used to in the bad old days.

But they don’t, really.  They’re no m ore able to do high school level work than their grandparents were, they’ve just be given a nice, but mostly meaningless ceremony in a cap and gown.