IMPACT OF HIGH SCHOOL PREPARATION
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be laughable. However, it seems to me that from the inception of the uni–
versities in the late middle ages until the 1960s, kids got an education and
then they went on to be trained. When I went through the process it
seemed to me that, basically, I was acquiring a vocabulary. In any event, in
the Middle Ages the graduate schools, law, medicine, and theology, trained
people for specific functions and until the 1960s that's pretty much what
happened, although we had business schools and dental schools and so on.
Now, when a kid gets out of high school he goes to college in order to
be trained. In my day, I thought education was fun. Dr. Finn's sixteen–
year-old kid never considered that doing a lab test or starting a history
paper was fun. So if that is the culture now, why don't we just make train–
ing the first portion of a post-high school education? Ask the kid what he
wants to do and train him for it. If he wants to be a potato farmer he
would have to learn some mathematics, some writing, etc. Thereby he
would get certain basic skills that he would normally get in a more theo–
retical form. Then we train the kid to do whatever he wants to do. Let's
reverse the medieval pattern, and offer
him
some culture, such as Mozart,
and a bit of vocabulary. My second suggestion addresses the other end, the
grammar schools: since the grammar school teacher has to be not only a
teacher but a parent, a social worker, a doctor, a nurse, a police officer, a
nutritionist, and heaven knows what else, why don't we put every gram–
mar school into two building? In the first we'll put teachers who will
teach, in the second we'll put all the ancillary services which the poor
teacher cannot provide
if
he or she still hopes to teach.
Rita Kramer: In response, I would like to suggest that you write a grant
proposal, and submit it to all the foundations you can think of, and let's
give it a try.
Igor Webb: Certainly, many American students are much more ready to
learn something after a certain real-world experience that actually engages
them. I tried to do this once in partnership with the Long Island Lighting
Company. They were very interested in offering a core curriculum to their
employees. Since they had a fairly active internal education system, we sug–
gested that it would be interesting to expand it, so that when the guy is
taught to
fix
your boiler, he could also be taught about physics. They were
pretty terrified of this idea. But I still think it would be a powerful way of
educating people who already have specific skills.
The only caveat to this, and you may hear this tomorrow, is that the
"new economy" values the qualities of mind that you get through a liber–
al arts education, which I'm not sure that you could offer in a context
different from the traditional one. But since the expectations of education
