On Schooling, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Career Readiness, &c.
I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This month's column kicks off a Summertime Fun in the Sun Series on Education! It goes like this:
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Getting Schooled
Of course you can fudge scores and graduate a class of functional illiterates – and public schools are accused of such skullduggery all the time by right-wing pundits. But even when we move away from dumb numbers and into fuzzier, but more reasonable questions of “career readiness” and “marketable skills,” that move doesn’t really change the metric. We’re still saying that the point of schooling – the point of our children’s lives, as they spend at least a third of each day on schooling – is to make more money.
Pardon me for playing to type, but that seems like a pretty goddamn shabby lesson for our kids, and a pretty shitty life goal.
“Hey, kid, what do you wanna be when you grow up?”
“Rich!”
If I heard my boy say that, it would turn my guts. . . .
