A Nation Still at Risk?
It seems like the quality of education in our country has been under a perpetual orange alert.
Last month, an Op-Ed contributor to the New York Times, Edward B. Fiske, wrote an editorial entitled A Nation at a Loss for the 25th anniversary of ‘A Nation at Risk,’ a National report that described an educational crisis in our country with language so dire that both our national security and our global economic competitiveness seemed imminently threatened. While the document’s legacy, Fiske argues, is that the quality of our education system has remained on the national political agenda ever since, it’s not clear how much good it has done us.
A short list of the various movements that have been reactions to our educational crisis: ‘standards-based reform, the 1989 ‘education summit’ that set six ‘national goals’ for education, the push for school choice and, most recently, the No Child Left Behind legislation.’ These projects have not exactly been slam dunk successes.
Based on the work we do in the epistemic games group, I have some ideas why. But before going on to describe some of its failings, I’d like to give our education system its due.
No other country even attempts to meet the needs of so many different types of students. The literacy rate for the U.S. is 99%, a most surprising number considering how horrible our educational self-esteem is. Saying our education system is failing is similar to saying that terrorists hate us: both are “true,” over-simplistic, and too often used to get us into even more trouble.
Yet when Fiske suggests that ‘we are failing to provide nearly one-third of our young people with even the minimal education required to be functioning citizens and workers in a global economy,’ I agree. Actually, I think the numbers are much greater, because I think that the fundamental philosophy behind our education system has been outdated for generations.
Fiske is troubled by the falling numbers of high school graduates (75% in 1983, 70% today). He is concerned that the ”¦United States, which used to lead the world in sending high school graduates on to higher education, has declined to fifth in the proportion of young adults who participate in higher education and is 16th out of 27 industrialized countries in the proportion who complete college, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.’ While I of course would love to see the number of high school and college graduates increase, I think the real problem is that schools were never designed to develop ‘functioning citizens and workers in a global economy.’ They were originally designed to produce factory workers, and their design hasn’t really changed since. So I am not just worried about the one-third. I am worried about all 50 million public school students.
Perhaps ‘A Nation at Risk’ was your basic fear-mongering, and, as Fiske argues, it’s not true that a ‘mediocre education inevitably leads to a weakened economy.’ But the relationship between education and economy is certainly not static. New technologies have made the economy global. And it seems that a mediocre education system will severely limit our nations’ ability to participate in it.
