American Style Education

 

I have been an on-the-job trainer since 1969 when I received my first full-time job after dropping out of college and needed to find employment because I was getting married.  I was able to continue my one-the-job training opportunities while in the military in the early 70’s and again after returning to college and graduating, helping fellow employees learn the specifics of their job duties and responsibilities.

But, it was not until 1986 that I was exposed to adult education through the Community College System designing and teaching training programs to employees of business and industry. One such program was Team Oriented Statistical Problem Solving that was basically a program of process improvement (reducing variation) by way of collecting and analyzing meaningful data. The key word here is meaningful.

It was though this process that I witnessed (firsthand) high school graduates that had been passed through the system by teachers who really did not want to be teachers or that did not want to hold the student accountable or that were simply overwhelmed by all the rules and regulations governing education (at that time) while receiving national average wages.  Many of these teachers had decided to only perform commensurate to their level of compensation and I could easily identify with their points-of-view as well as with their frames-of-mind.

This was a milestone awareness to me because I began to realize and confirm visually that our free market enterprise system was structured in such a way as to pay the employee closest to the customer the least amount of money.  To this day, I have still not discovered which business school is teaching this nonsense yet it is the way, more often than not, that we seem to operate.

Many of these high school graduates could not spell, could not write complex sentences, did not know basic math or science, and had little (if any) sound knowledge about history or how legislation was passed through Congress.  Today, over 20 years later, it might be a little better; but, can you imagine working in an American company with a culturally diverse workforce and many of the Americans don’t know history or how laws move through Congress…  How embarrassing…

I recall during the 90’s being asked to address a high school Junior Achievement class and talk about business and future opportunities.  I  was informed straight away by the students that they did not care what I had to say that all they needed from me was to tell them what was going to be on the test at the end of the class so that they could memorize the information, receive a high grade, and not jeopardize their chances of getting into college as it was not a matter of what you knew but one’s grades.

So, we might ask ourselves:  who was responsible for creating that mentality?

Well, actually I do not have enough fingers on both hands collectively to point to all the people who are in some way responsible.  And, I do not imagine much has changed since then.

Is it horrible for me to think what I am about to write but does this same mentality exist in our colleges and universities?  Do we pass students through to simply maintain constants streams of revenues from one year to the next?

As the cost of education rises, less and less can afford the opportunity, putting more and more pressure on school to keep those students that they presently have enrolled.  I mean, we certainly do not want to reduce the salaries of our professors to keep these cost low, do we?