If Not Hair, Then Where?
If good looks was a minute/ You know that you could've been an hour- Smokey Robinson, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'
Listen Bill, this IS my Mustang pride!
Something strange and disturbing is happening to a public high school outside Chicago. Something never seen or heard of before. Something that disturbs the mind. Something that rips at the core of public high school stereotypes. And it all starts here, or rather, hair…
“What we don’t want are the pinks and greens and blues,” said Evergreen Park High School (EPHS) principal Bill Sanderson.
Yes, that’s right; he’s talking about hair color, specifically the hair color of EPHS students. A new rule in the EPHS handbook this school year prohibits students from dying their hair “unnatural colors” such as those Sanderson listed. Last time I checked, EPHS was a P.U.B.L.I.C. high school. To me (and the rest of those who attended a private high school), this translates to People Use Bold License in Coloring Hair School. It’s right there in the acronym, right?! Dyed hair is one of the principle clues to identifying public school students. They wear jeans, ripped t-shirts, XXL sweatshirts, and sulky ‘I hate my life’ facial expressions to go along with their unique locks. What’s a good eye roll to an authority figure without spiky green hair? What’s a nose piercing without subtly arranged pink highlights? How can you strip away a group’s identity?
Sphere: Related ContentWhy Go To College? Why Go To Night School?
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are aware that I am highly skeptical of the American higher education system. At best, it is a terribly inefficient cash grab by institutions who claim to be serving the public. At worse, it is a rigorous form of social apartheid which feeds on the fears of the elites and their desires to guarantee success for their progeny.
Either way, we can blow up this system at any point and I would not shed tear one for any tenured professor.
The Wall Street Journal, which I rode over the coals a couple of weeks ago, contains a piece by Charles Murray which I couldn’t agree with more.
Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn’t meet the goal. We will call the goal a “BA.”
You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that’s the system we have in place.
Fantastic! Murray calls for a series of certification tests as a means for institutions to identify appropriate candidates, modeled on the CPA. I concur. I distinctly recall my state certification test for teaching. The test was such an absolute joke- a fact that indicted not only the state Board of Ed but the schools who provide Illinois with teachers.
To paraphrase Will Hunting, Americans spend billions of dollars collecting initials after their names which could be had for hundreds of dollars in late fines at the public library in a more perfect world.
Sphere: Related ContentIvy Retardation
The American Scholar published an article by William Deresiewicz, a professor at Yale University, which describes the phenomenon he calls “Ivy Retardation.”
We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and
everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to
give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when
people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard,
I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to
school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are
smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of
class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at
all.
So very true. I openly loathe the American education system. Yes, I am currently training to be a test prep instructor, thereby helping more students game the system. I am part of the problem. But I do know what the solution is. The American education system is nothing more than a guarantor of privileges of your socioeconomic class. The idea that there is any equality at all is laughable. Equal education will only arrive when teaching becomes training, when all students are given the basics towards their survival in a global market.
Yes, this would be more money for teachers, and higher taxes. But it would emphasize broad, marketable skills- reading, writing, math, and technology. The lie of American education is that anyone can be President. Maybe so, but that is not a goal. The country needs construction workers and adminstrative assistants. What the country doesn’t need is failed schools and academics more in love with theory than training.
True, education is better today on a global perspective. More women and handicapped receive proper education. But, top to bottom, the American education system relies less on its primary goal (education) than on illusory social skills (phys ed, networking, adding resources, etc.).
Our empire will crumble here, not through misbegotten wars or failed environmental policies. Poor students make poor leaders.
O'Hare Arpt., IL
