Graduation Season: Why Do Students Have To Wait Until 21 To Commence?

Where were you when I was stuck in high school, staring at the wall, pretending to learn calculus?  Or even in third grade, learning how to do long division with a pencil?  Many of the skills I learned in public school and in college are skills that I hated learning and have never used since.  The skills I actually use I learned in my Masters program -- I went to seminary.

On a related note -- many churches are in trouble because they can't afford to pay their clergy enough for the clergy to pay off their seminary and undergraduage debt.  If we skipped all the nonsense in education, making it shorter and cheaper, we could save a lot of churches a lot of money.

Not just churches, I suspect.  

To put it bluntly, there are waaaay too many people who shouldn't be anywhere near a college (and I'm not even counting the athletes) or particularly a university taking up space in both.  The first to go had better be anyone who utters any phrase generally meaning "why do I have to take these courses that have nothing to do with my major?"  If you're asking that question you're in the wrong place.

Well, as Edward Gibbon said, "The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."

Great, so we get a bunch of mediocrerly-educated 10th grade graduates who take vocational training instead of college and...ooops, they pick a vocation that quickly becomes obsolete.  Now they have no communication skills, none of the remedial learning that sadly takes place today in college, bupkus.  Just what are the "safe" vocational training professions that can take the place of the last two years of high school and college?  Even computer science isn't a magic pill -- look how much of the programming field got outsourced.  As they figure out ways to plug and play network maitenance (our IT people now routinely log into our system remotely and troubleshoot from their offices), those jobs will shrink/be outsourced as well.  

The problem with education isn't structural and it sure isn't too MUCH instruction, it's the lack of high quality teachers.

well lymon1  the idea is to end up with a group of reasonably and sensibly educated tenth graders

with the abilities to face life-long learning and working.  I agree with you that it is hard to think of

sending them to a particular trade school to learn a skill that will be outsourced in x years time, but the

idea would be a basic education that prepares them to be able to deal with these changes.

You are absolutly right that any education question must demand high quality teachers and that probably means going back to stage one as well.  

I believe the author's point was that given sound basic skills thinking and general knowledge, many would also rely of the master/apprentice type of on the job training.You can not teach a class about tweaking twitter's tweating whatsits, but with sound basics you can be taught it on site by somebody who knows it thoroughly and, as many techies today, are open to discussion, interaction and innovative thought tinkering.

This will probably kill the idea, but:  the Bard High School  seems roughly tied to some patterns in

current European education systems.  Believe me, they have their big problems, too.  There is some concern /or hope depending upon where you stand/  that these systems build an elitist, class-bound approach.

It is true, I believe, that both sides of the Atlantic are floundering at the moment in their attempts to create

a solution to many education approaches.  

Bipartisanship Beware: Why The Democrats Should Disregard The GOP's Opposition To Health Care Reform

"The problem with education isn't structural and it sure isn't too MUCH instruction, it's the lack of high quality teachers."

...and even more importantly, the lack of high quality student.  An ever increasing problem is we look at who has children and who doesn't.  

I agree that if we spent more on educating kids in the early years------for example by having a much higher teacher/student ratio-----then all the rest could proceed much more efficiently.  After students become able to read independently, a lot more of their studies should proceed at speeds they set for themselves.  Kids should not be forced to  learn lockstep at a  ridiculously slow pace that has  been established to ensure that virtually everyone in the room can keep up with it.  So many students lose their interest in learning because everything is SO dumbed down.

My son's first grade teacher thought he was learning disabled because he tuned out in her class.  He is now getting a Phd in chemistry at an Ivy league school.  Although some would argue that he clearly got through it just fine, I would argue that he really SUFFERED for YEARS from boredom in school, that he succeeded because his parents were able to understand and expose him to interesting materials, and that years of his life were WASTED because of our educational system.

We need to grow up emotionally as a society, and be able to acknowledge that although people are equal, they are not identical.  People have different strengths, and our society benefits when all of these are developed.  Not everyone is cut out for rigorous college coursework, and it is a waste on a huge scale to maintain these lengthy, expensive programs that leave so many students in debt and with few skills.  

That said, vocational programs should also have some distribution requirements that continue to develop critical thinking skills.  We will always need an electorate that can understand the issues.  

Wow, I think I've never agreed with a TNR article more, I wholeheartedly support this move. I have 3 college degrees and worked in a high school for years. We need fewer people in college, students out of high school quicker and more work-ready training. Too bad its going to be impossible to purge colleges of the excess students especially in graduate schools. I was in a library science program that gave out 200 fricking degrees for a field that produces about 30 jobs a year in the state, absolutely criminal.

I remember reading years ago that someone (Bertrand Russell  ?) thought that our lengthy educational system was useful mostly in keeping large numbers of people out of the workplace for years.  Such a pleasant way to ease unemployment!

Of course it is nice if our society is wealthy enough to enjoy the luxury of educating our kids for an extra long time, but if we are implementing the unabridged version of capitalism and global competition, we really will have to change things drastically if we expect to stay in the game.  

I hope we can manage to make our educational system more efficient without making our schools the moral equivalent of the industrial farms; sometimes excessive competition just forces everyone to stoop to new lows.

Ken -- points taken, but I think the cart (the better early education) has to go before the horse.  There's another alternative here: bake more vocational programs into colleges.  For example, Kendall College here in the Chicago area had a degree that included MSCE certification for wouldbe IT techs.

The problem with a liberal arts education is that the breadth it provides is extremely shallow. Where I got my BA there were 6 science departments (only! because Computer Science was part of the Math dept), 8 social science departments, and 8 humanities departments (treating all non-English language departments as a single department). 22 departments. Students were required to receive credit for 33 courses to graduate. Majors averaged 1 freshman prerequisite course and 8 upper class courses, so 9 major courses. 33 - 9 = 24. 22 - 1 - 21. So the average student had 24 course slots to sample the offerings from 21 non-major departments.

It's was actually narrower than that since the foreign language requirement was 3 courses in one language. So the average student had 21 course slots to sample offerings from 20 departments outside their major and chosen foreign language.

And that's the average student. Chemistry, Physics and Engineering Science majors had 6 prerequisite courses in Math, Chemistry or Physics that didn't count towards their 8 course major requirements. The awkward truth is that you can't really major in science at a liberal arts college and have a real shot at much breadth.

Don't stop at reforming secondary schools. If we're going to keep liberal arts colleges, students should be obliged to get some depth in multiple subjects, i.e., mandatory minors in other divisions. For example, English majors required to complete minors in a social science and a laboratory science. And that would mean taking at least 4 courses that would qualify as major courses in their minor departments, and that would require taking the necessary prereqs. If the goal is to radically reduce the number of English majors, this ought to manage it.

Yes lymon1 the Kendall College idea sounds great.  This is done in Europe with  high level technical schools (as replacements for "academic"  high schools) whose graduates are highly sought after.

In addition there is a "university equivalent" degree (somewhat like a BS or MBS) for those in engineering and ITareas.  In many cases, these graduates are more sought offer than those from Engineering/Technical

universitives.

The better early education is a "bugbear" of mine as well.  The pyramid of investment and quality teaching has

to be reversed, so that kindergarten, pre-school, elementary education get the most money.  

Kerfuffler's idea about further education keeping young people out of the workforce reminds me of what we said in 1968.  Worse now are the situation where  young members of fringe groups or minorities are left

to the ugliness of unemployment.

As for education for people of advance age--LIKE ME--could somebody please tell me what I have to do

so my posts don't look like erratic bird scratchings!  This is humiliating:  especially as the most important thing

I learned in High School in the early 60s was typing!

I'm on the faculty of a Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Department in a second tier medical school in the Southeast, and we have witnessed a significant "trickle-up" effect of the inflation of societal education norms into medical and graduate school as well.  The students are coming in each year, both to medical school and PhD programs in biochemistry & molecular/cell biology, with increasingly poorer previous exposure and understanding of fundamental prerequisite concepts in chemistry and biology.  These students do not understand, and generally claim to have never been exposed to, basics that we as faculty all learned in high school, not to mention with considerably more rigor as an undergraduate.  It makes it very difficult to then teach advanced biochemistry courses commensurate with medical and graduate level coursework, when we are constantly providing remediation at the most basic level.  Unfortunately, the folks in Academic Affairs don't want to hear that we are admitting students who aren't prepared intellectually for medical or graduate school.  We are told that there are "many different types of learners, and we need to accommodate all learning styles."  What this really means is that not only do we have to provide comprehensive and up do date lectures, which is what we should be doing, but also spend many hours per hour of lecture tutoring students individually to make up for their increasingly shoddy prior education.  And, when they do fail, we have to remediate them further, until they finally are squeezed through the system by passing some watered down shelf exam.  Shockingly, many will admit that they're only in it for the "piece of paper", anyway.  Future doctors, indeed.  Frankly, from what I have seen, I would not be surprised at all if graduate and medical education became the new "college," as this trend continues.

Just to clarify, are you saying that the MCAT physics and biology tests are becoming too lax?  Or that even students who do well on them have other weaknesses that are revealed later?

In grade 10 you're fifteen/sixteen. When I was that age all I wanted to do was go to parties, chase girls and hang out with my friends at the pool hall and pursue other like activities. My marks were lousy. I just barely passed. I did well enough eventually to get into a good Canadian university. I wound up getting a graduate degree and was an excellent graduate student. I also got a professional degree and did well enough to get admitted into a Masters program in my profession. At 15/16 I didn't have a clue.

My friend emigrated to Canada from Hungary in his early teens. There was a streaming program at his High School, starting in grade nine, under which kids were put into acdemic or a vocational flow. It was suggested to my friend that he go into the vocational stream considering his English, that his mother was a hair dresser and his father was a labourer. He didn't and now he's a pharmacist with real intellectual curiosity about art, politics and like subjects.

I'm making no argument here really. But I'm offering two true anecdotal examples of kids who may well have been fucked in their lives if such choices had to be made at such a callow age.

The other thing I wanted to say, that even though I often disagree with McWhorter, his place here is lively and it stems from his own ability to be provocative, iconoclastic, thoughful and challenging all at the same time.

I agree wholeheartedly.  Our nation's quixotic emphasis on classroom learning for everyone--even though a sizable proportion of the population gains little from it once it attains basic literacy and numeracy--has been a minor obsession of mine since I myself was in high school.  For many college is actively harmful, a hindrance to maturation, a four year holiday from any kind of responsibility.  

A problem, however, is the de-cronification of our economy.  Used to be people were given jobs often because of who they knew and people were denied jobs because of the color or their skin or their sex.  In the absence of such unfair practices, employers need other ways to sort candidates out.  Academic credentials--however meaningless on a practical level--have become the default means of differentiation.  If you did "blow the whole thing up" and start again, you'd need to institute other ways of making hiring decisions so it didn't devolve into white foremen giving all the choice jobs to the white sons of their white buddies.

"Just to clarify, are you saying that the MCAT physics and biology tests are becoming too lax?  Or that even students who do well on them have other weaknesses that are revealed later?"

My sense is it's more the latter, combined with the fact that MCAT scores are only a part of the consideration for admission, and sometimes a minor one in light of performance or experience in other areas.  However, I'm not on the admissions committee, so I don't know the MCAT scores of our students.  I can only speak to their performance once there.  I doubt that the MCAT has gotten more lax, but I haven't seen one in a couple years.  Somehow the situation is as it is.  It's really more an issue of the admissions and retention process, which is ultimately responsible for the character of the student population.

3 tiers:

After 10th grade, kids pick:

1. Take a skills test and drop out (discouraged).

2. Take a skills test and enroll in a vocational school (subsidized if not outright paid for).

3. Remain in high school on the 'college track.'

Everyone with experience and half a brain in education agrees.

Me? This is one of my '5 pillars of reform.'

What the hell is the hurry, so we are going to have people work earlier and work later all to keep mammon happy? Is that all life is? plying a trade? It is easy enough for someone sitting on their ass writing, but try laying tar on a hot roof for a year and you will be screaming to go back to school, whatever your age.

In China where I worked for years the educational system is far more rigorous and far longer, part of it has to be, do you have any idea how long it takes to learn 20,000 characters? Students have classes for 240 days, days start at 8:00 am and end at 4:30, then students have 2 hours mandatory study time from 6:30 to 8:30, no sports besides simple athletics. My chinese born wife, who was a mediocre student in China going to a lesser school attends classes on and off during summer sessions and consistently is at the top of her class, this in a language that is not her first. I also have former students now living in America who went to the better schools commanding very good salaries.

Americans, meanwhile, are idiots when it comes to foreign languages, and are rapidly falling down the chart in the sciences. Now we have the bright idea to replicate the stupidity of the cultural revolution (when schools were shuttered for long periods of time). Yeah, lets go the Chinese peasant route, that worked really well. People are living longer, and will have to work longer, let's not be in such a hurry to knock together a few nickels, because without the ability to acquire new learning, that is all it will be.

As a thought exercise, this is fine, but in reality this idea is really, really dumb. If you want to talk about reform, then lets look at other nations programs instead of pretending America exists as its own planet.

To those in the sciences/engineering academia, has the huge increase in foreign students at the graduate level improved or decreased the quality of the students you teach/supervise?  I've been a practicing design engineering in the semiconductor industry for over 20 yrs. and have some opinions, but before I vocalize them I'd like to hear what those in the academy have to say.

Anyone notice anything interesting about this thread?  Like, you know, that it's actually INTERESTING?

TNRD take note, when you allow subscribers to comment upon your more substantive content--as opposed to the typical tossed-off posts over at The Plank and The Stash--and to do so in a way that permits back-and-forth conversation and limits the presence of trolls (i.e. by limiting comments to subscribers) it ADDS VALUE.

A few thoughts:

First, the idea of a liberal arts degree, at least how it is pursued today, is corrupt.  It is pursued for economic reasons, not personal development.  Thus, it provides neither.

As a high school dropout myself, there is absolutely no value in a high school education past 10th grade... assuming you absorbed anything past the 5th grade... or you're going into a technical field such as engineering, computer science, or physics.  Let's not kid ourselves, very few people go into those fields.  Let's make sure our kids can read and write, do simple algebra, and understand the political process.

We also need to stop pretending that college students get anything out of the courses they are forced to take as part of a "well-rounded" liberal arts education.  We are a nation that is adept at faking our way through higher education.  Critical thinking, while a great buzzword for administrators, is not something that is applied by the majority of college students.

At the same time, there is a need for the liberal arts.  There is a need for higher education.  The problem is, we're not fulfilling those needs through our four year institutions.  We are not producing legions of culturally and politically aware individuals, capable of making wise decisions for the Republic.  We are producing masses of self-absorbed worker bees with feelings of entitlement.  And no sense of humor.  Hate that.

McWhorter:

Once again, you manage to amaze with your peculiar relationship to the English language.

You write: “…the typical eighth grader a century ago had a facility in, for example, writing that few of today's college graduates could even approximate.  The almost flabbergastingly eloquent letters written by Civil War soldiers are a famous example.”

Physician, heal thyself.  Your own ‘facility in writing’ {sic} is execrable.

Your argument for education reform would persuade more readers if your style did not offend our eyes.

I submit just one more, but surely not the worst, example.  You write: “In much less time than we take students' time up with now…“  Please don’t say your ear cannot detect the nauseating weirdness of that repeated word ‘time’!  Not to mention  ‘up with,’ those horribly conjoined prepositions!

At risk of repeating myself -- GET AN EDITOR!

Yes so true - students aren't learning the skills they need for the workforce as early as they should.  We should go back to the way it was - black kids learn to pick cotton and never know anything else.  Italians learn to fix cars.  Polish learn that they're morons.  Leave the book learning for the WASPs.  This is a good way for our society to advance.

fwslusser

Blackton, I liked your post.

aeromonas, I noticed.  Are all of McWhorters discussions like this?  because I've been reading the wrong TNR blog.

I can't add much to what has been said.  Seems like a partial consensus is that our schooling at all levels needs to be much more rigorous no matter the length.

I'm still a student in engineering and medicine, but my experience with the foreign graduate students is that they are about as capable as the relatively rare American-born students.  But they do generally work a bit harder, and our entire University research system would collapse without them.

At my current point in my program, I've only completed the first 2 years of medical school, but at least there I actually felt that the medical students were just as smart as our instructors, and while their attitudes toward learning in general may not be quite the same, I think most will make decent doctors.

I note that neither McWhorter nor none of the other posters to this thread seems to be aware of a federal law that prohibits employers from requiring prospective hires to take an intelligence test or to provide the results of such a test previously administered elsewhere. I should think that most contributers to this thread can figure out why this law exists.

Although the forces at work so well enumerated above certainly have played a role in the requirement for a college degree for jobs where it is self-evident no such degree is really necessary, that degree has become a surrogate for the banned use of other such measures of qualification. If nothing else, the degree also serves as a proxy for measuring perseverance.

I, myself, told my children that the purpose of going to college was to become an educated person. And that each of them should seek out every opportunity to do so. They were, of course, among the very few of their peers with any such direction.

The Liberal Arts, and especially the study of philosophy, is wasted on the young.  The value of this kind of education is increased with life experience.

...And meanwhile, why is 17 or 18 too young to start training to be a systems analyst? What exactly happens to a human being between 17 and 21 that makes them inherently more suited to being a systems analyst? A four-year college education? How?...

If the difference is 4years of being exposed to parts of the world's best wisdom, art, science, great books, and what all consitutues a liberal education, then that question, I think, answers itself. The challenge is to take students' indifference and misunderstanding of relevance and, not letting that uneducatedness be the measure of intention, and transform them into some hunger and love of great knowledge for its own sake. Then at 21 or so they can have 45-50 years of being a systems analyst or whatever.

...And meanwhile, why is 17 or 18 too young to start training to be a systems analyst? What exactly happens to a human being between 17 and 21 that makes them inherently more suited to being a systems analyst? A four-year college education? How?...

If the difference is 4years of being exposed to parts of the world's best wisdom, art, science, great books, and what all consitutues a liberal education, then that question, I think, answers itself. The challenge is to take students' indifference and misunderstanding of relevance and, not letting that uneducatedness be the measure of intention, and transform them into some hunger and love of great knowledge for its own sake. Then at 21 or so they can have 45-50 years of being a systems analyst or whatever.

I would like to echo basman and blackton.  We need to focus in on the purpose of education.  The consensus view here seems to be that the purpose is to prepare kids for the job market.  That's part of the purpose.  Another part is to avoid populating the nation with dumb, soulless shits.  Now, maybe we're not doing a very good job of that.  The answer, it would seem to me, is to do a better job rather than to give up entirely.

misprision,  

you have distinguished yourself by the hostility of your tone------you don't get bonus points in style for that!

And besides, it seems that everybody else here is more interested in substance than style.

For everyone else:

I have really enjoyed hearing reading all the different opinions, and confess to having all sorts of conflicting ideas as to what should be done with our system.  Mostly I think we need to get past our one size fits all approach, but that it very hard to do in a society still plagued by  discriminatory unfairness.  

jhildner: Another part is to avoid populating the nation with dumb, soulless shits.

I agree, that is what the Republican party is for.

"...'Another part is to avoid populating the nation with dumb, soulless shits'

I agree, that is what the Republican party is for..."

Blackton, I figure you are kidding.

But this provides for some overarching perspective regardless: www.tnr.com/.../story.html

Sorry wrong cite:scrap the above; it's this one: www.tnr.com/.../story.html

Hey I had it right the first time. Whaddya' know?

I want to make another comment on the liberal arts question -- coming as I am from a bruising week-long interaction over higher ed priorities with roiduboloi over the the Spine -- is that false distinctions between humanities and sciences are the bane of this debate.  "Liberal arts" traditionally meant also that the student should be acquainted with basic scientific knowledge and intellectual procedures, and not just Introduction to Plato, The Graphic Novel 1960 to the Present, and American History Survey I.  Tthis complex connection is shown by the tendency of English majors to score better on MCAT than biology majors.

Blackie, yes.  At this particular moment anyway, I am increasingly inclined to view the Republican Party as the party not only of bungling but of heartlessness, selfishness, and callous disregard or dismissal of vast swaths of the American population.  I don't believe it was always such.  The conservative movement which has characterized much -- though not, until relatively recently, just about all -- of the Republican Party since Reagan popularized it has always struck me as embodying a perverse set of values that, ironically, are diametrically opposed to the message of the spiritual figure to whom Republicans tend to offer such conspicuous devotion.  I went to the University of Chicago Law School where I encountered many sincere conservatives of principle who were not what I would call evil -- far from it!  But where the rubber meets the road, I find it increasingly difficult to reconcile nice people with nasty views.  I notice today that Republicans are once again arguing heartily against health care reform.  When they are in power, they don't propose *anything* to fix a health care system that excludes millions, gives millions more the shaft, that is more than half again as expensive per capita as systems that cover everyone for free, and that ends up resulting in poorer health.  What exactly is the argument against the claim that our system is not only costly and inefficient but grossly unfair?  Proposing a fix always falls on Democrats who are barraged with, it has to be said, knowingly false charges of "socialism" -- as well as countless other lies -- when they do.  What am I to make of that?  Today's Republican Party is the group that spits on the word "empathy," that rolls its eyes at the suggestion of hardship and the notion of a helping hand.  What am I supposed to make of that?  I'm a reasonable guy.  I understand this or that honest argument against this or that policy, and I know well that some of these issues -- especially an issue like health care reform -- are complicated and that I don't know a lot about them.  What I don't understand is a party that would insist upon the virtue of economic loserdom, that would say, as the conservative-dominated Supreme Court did recently, that convicted criminals don't have a right to test their claim of innocence by having someone test the DNA sample that is sitting in the state's cupboard, that proposes that excluding millions of gay Americans from the full measure of citizenship is not only okay but morally required, that torture is not only okay but morally required, that rights are stupid and that the liberty to which we owe the greatest deference is the liberty of legal -- not natural -- persons whose sole purpose is to further enrich a few rich people.  Conservatives seem to live in a world in which everyone gets what they deserve, in which nobody suffers legitimate economic hardship, in which nobody is wrongfully convicted of a crime, in which a pregnancy is always a welcome blessing, in which the stupid are smart and the smart are insidious, and I don't know what else.  It seems to be either a cruel fantasy or just cruel.  Maybe insisting upon a more -- not less -- thorough and rigorous study of truth and humanity during our citizens' formative years would result in less fertile ground for the collective dickishness that the GOP has come to represent.

That's all true, jhildner, and one curious related fact is that most Americans don't really share those positions or values, or only in part.  The GOP's great bait and switch has been to convince Americans that if we had an efficient and fair health care system we would be less "American," that if we had an intelligent and focused foreign policy we are wimps waiting for someone to roll over us, and that the saving of our natural treasures and wild places (a policy begun by an admired Republican president) is a plot to dismantle our individuality and undermine our economy.

How did they do this?  By tapping into the provincial, paranoid, and mean-spirited elements in the American psyche more effectively than the Democrats tapped into the wide-angle, confident, and generous elements.  The process has been helped by the increasingly weird obsessions that have haunted this society and have broadly helped conservatives:  the paranoia about absolute safety, the willingness to ditch objective evaluation in favor of personal "witness," the juvenile magical thinking that has e.g. political leaders, all adults, exulting in how they have changed french fries to liberty fries, the idea that sexuality is a dangerous and evil force (even the 1950s wasn't as bad in many ways), and other fantasies that American life should be like a white upper middle-class suburb in summer.

Irony, Bill Maher said it well I thought the other night.  On one side of the aisle, you've got the center-right party of commercial interests.  That's the Democrats.  On the other side, you've got a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers, and Civil War reenactors that calls itself the Republicans.  Over the past 30 years or so, the Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved into a mental hospital.  So maybe Democrats are heartless too -- just not nuts.

I think that Maher's take is a worthy jab though not quite true.  The Democrats comprise a center-left party that has become more business-friendly but maintains, at least aspirationally, the social and moral commitments we associate with Democrats -- concerns about things like economic opportunity, equality before the law, personal liberty, the "general welfare," and so forth.  And you're absolutely right that Americans do not actually share the eccentric philosophy of modern conservatism (to the extent it is a philosophy).  Poll after poll shows that, including a recent one in which Americans approve spending more and even tolerating somewhat less convenient care in exchange for universal health coverage, and overwhelmingly support the idea of a Medicare-style optional government plan to compete with private insurers.  Republicans may look at those polls and think, Well, we haven't had a good crack at scaring away their compassion yet -- it's early days.  Americans aren't assholes, nor are they subscribers to the philosophy of Ayn Rand, whom they've never heard of; they're just prone to anxiety.  (Who isn't?)  Today's silent majority is reasonable and generous and needs a credible leader to tap those instincts and do something great with them.  Obama has exhibited an ability to do that, because he exhibits the attitude and instincts of that silent majority.  But he's got to actually, you know, go ahead and do it.

Agreed absolutely with that last comment.  One little question I have about Maher's model, however, is this:  if that rightward movement has taken place, then why hasn't there been a reasonable political option arriving on the left, to take the space vacated by the Dems?

In some European countries, over the last 20 years or so, the Greens have managed that while at the same time fuzzying the "left" label.  In some worse cases, a paranoid populism has re-emerged.  And in many ways the GOP fantasy of a militant left Democratic Party was truer in 1989 than in 2009.  All of the above -- and it's too late in the night for my brain to work more than at 40 watts -- lead me to be afraid of a right-wing populist movement in the U.S. that will paint the Dems and the Obama administration as both socialistic and against the regular guy.

If Obama is too middle-of-the-road, it could be dangerous.  Which I think is close to what you were saying.

Irony:  I think your question is answered by the facts that we don't have a parliamentary system or preference voting.  In Europe, Greens get a seat at the table.  In America, Greens give us George W. Bush.  No, those of us who are more liberal than the Democratic mean in Washington need to jab, prod, advocate, insist, and do all those things strategically and credibly in order to influence the direction of the big-tent party we're in (even if we wish otherwise) without causing the tent to collapse -- because, without the tent, we are utterly powerless and the goals we complain are not being pursued fast enough or fully enough now would go totally ignored.  Although Maher harshly blasts Democrats, jabs like his may help.  (His New Rules monologue last week, in which he was tough on Obama, got noticed in part because it tapped into what a lot of us hopeful types have been thinking lately.)

Many excellent points brought up in this thread.  A few touched upon the emotional immaturity of teens between 15-18 years of age.  Perhaps starting with a more rigorous education (what we now consider "pre-school" at age 3) would help with that. Certainly, getting a job starting around age 12 would help as well (I'll spare you my life and employment stories).  And yes, there are some kids who are mature from an early age. But recent neurologic and psychological studies indicate that the judgement area of our brains are not fully developed until as late as age 25.  This is another implication to consider if pursuing a track like this.

The removal of vocational training from high schools (not to mention, music, arts, athletics) etc has had a much broader negative reach than people anticipated or will admit.  Our "everyone gets a ribbon for participating" society also makes it difficult for people (really, parents) to admit that not everyone is cut out for academics, advanced/rigrous or otherwise. Tracking really is the way to go, as many posters with foreign educational experience noted.

Me? I was lucky enough to be allowed to "skip" grades 3 and 12, resulting in graduation and beginning of college at age 16. As my high school prinicipal said, "we need to get you out of here before you get into so much trouble that no college will take you".  And with my BS and PharmD metaphorically hung on the wall (and my productive entry into society), who can say he was wrong?