> Even California does not think the point of public education to be basic functioning as an adult citizen. The vision statement is “All California students of the 21st century will attain the highest level of academic knowledge, applied learning and performance skills to ensure fulfilling personal lives and careers and contribute to civic and economic progress in our diverse and changing democratic society.”
Ohhh, if wishes were horses, my friend.
Have you ever worked at a place where the mission statement contained things like "a commitment to excellence" and yet most everybody around you (quite possibly including yourself) was decidedly mediocre, employing practices (like doctrinaire Scrum) that precluded excellence and were intended to manage mediocre workers?
California's education system, like nearly all USA education systems, is based on the Prussian model, which was devised by Industrial Revolution magnates as a way to mass-train children into future workers for their factories. Any pretense to excellence, or education to the highest level, is aspirational at best, a fig leaf at worst.
I went to SF schools including Lowell. Lowell, at the time, was blessed with strong science and mathematics teachers and a particularly great English composition teacher. Lowell possesses an extremely strong alumni community who are grateful for the education they received. If you look at school rankings at the time, Lowell was ranked in the top 100 high schools in the nation. Lowell has more Nobel Prize winners than most colleges and universities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Lowell_High_School_(Sa...
My proposed solutions aren’t whimsy. They are proposed solutions to problems that a classmate of mine at Lowell encountered. He and I were both low income, so we had free lunch. He complained that there was no quiet place for him to study at home. He is Hispanic. I am Asian.
Teachers preferred teaching at Lowell because the students wanted to learn and because they didn’t like the chaos found at other high schools including fights, gangs, and truancy.
> California's education system, like nearly all USA education systems, is based on the Prussian model, which was devised by Industrial Revolution magnates as a way to mass-train children into future workers for their factories.
Are you sure about that? If anything, I would expect the Prussians to worry about training future soldiers and good Royal subjects. Especially since Prussia introduced mandatory public schooling in 1717; that's long before industrialisation hit the country. (Even in Britain, Wikipedia has the Industrial Revolution start about 1760.)
Ohhh, if wishes were horses, my friend.
Have you ever worked at a place where the mission statement contained things like "a commitment to excellence" and yet most everybody around you (quite possibly including yourself) was decidedly mediocre, employing practices (like doctrinaire Scrum) that precluded excellence and were intended to manage mediocre workers?
California's education system, like nearly all USA education systems, is based on the Prussian model, which was devised by Industrial Revolution magnates as a way to mass-train children into future workers for their factories. Any pretense to excellence, or education to the highest level, is aspirational at best, a fig leaf at worst.