EDITORIAL: A new look at a college education

OPINION:

There’s a growing belief that a college education may not be as important as everyone has assumed for a century. This upsets considerable settled (social) science. For decades Germany, for example, has demonstrated that secondary education — what in the United States are called high schools — linked to private industry can be a workable alternative to the college classroom.

When menial and unskilled jobs are replaced by the digital revolution, it’s crucial to imagine new ways to guide young people into technical skills to provide a useful livelihood and a comfortable life. Many employers avoid hiring the graduates of college courses in information technology because the courses are not as effective as they should be.

Better, this new thinking goes, to organize a new kind of high school to teach that technology, to guarantee a young man or woman a solid technical education as the foundation of a prosperous working life. This requires restoring some fundamentals that have been lost along the way. Old methods of “rote learning,” basics as they were once called, were discarded for more “erudite” educational philosophies. But authentic erudition has not always followed, making the choice of the right college or university all the more important, beginning with whether the student wants to stay in the comfort of the feathered nest or use college to escape the old homestead.

President Obama joins the assumption of the elites that college is for everyman. Hence his scheme to award the campus experience to everyone. But recent testing in California, long regarded as a bellwether state, confirms what many teachers see every day, that many high school graduates are not up to challenge of a classic college curriculum.

For more than a half a century, many colleges have required a remedial English course for every freshman because grammar, elocution and even handwriting have been abandoned by elementary and high school administrators as part of the basic education. Many high school graduates have an inadequate comprehensive grasp of the mother tongue, aggravated by the growing number of children from households where English is not even the stepmother tongue. Many of the old standbys in secondary schooling have been abandoned. Phys ed, ranging from calisthenics to organized ball games, has gone missing in many elementary and high schools. Schools that once required basic hygiene and dietary instruction along with the mandatory exercise have been discontinued. An epidemic of obesity followed. All this has required the lengthening of adolescence, assigned to the campus.

The idea that imposing a college education on everyone hardly contributes to a solution for what’s wrong with the modern education of the young. What’s happening on campus is an example of what happens when “the big,” whether big university or big government, is regarded as the solution to every problem. Sometimes thinking smaller is the biggest idea of all.