Category: Education

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Do You Have Something to Say?

writing a bookFrom the Neanderthals who left hand prints on the cavern walls of El Castillo, Spain more than 37,000 years ago, to the G.I.’s crude drawings of a long-nosed fellow peering over a fence announcing, “Kilroy was here,” humans have sought immortality through art. The same impulse that drives the graffiti tagger in Los Angeles drives the white-haired Hamptons matron to pen a letter to the local newspaper about animal leash laws: a desire to be seen, heard, and remembered.
 
The digital revolution gives us an opportunity to communicate and disseminate ideas, concepts, and opinions without intermediation. Today, every wannabe Stephen King, Tom Brokaw, or Larry McMurtry can write and publish as they please. Grandfathers and grandmothers can pass down family stories to younger generations. The entire world has an opportunity to become both more knowledgeable and more expressive than ever before.

Technology and Self-Publishing

The first electronic book – Peter James’ thriller “Host” – appeared on two floppy disks in 1993 and sold 12,000 copies. Five years later, the first e-readers appeared with mediocre market success. Amazon, the world’s largest book retailer, introduced the Kindle reader to America in 2007, forever changing the dynamics of book publishing. Today, electronic books can be viewed on a variety of readers, mobile phones, tablets, and computers.
 
In the first quarter of 2012, net sales of ebooks exceeded hardcover sales across the industry for the first time. While paperback books remain the industry’s most popular format, their dominance is likely short-lived – according to Mashable, Amazon’s ebook sales surpassed paperbacks in the fourth quarter of 2011. The reason for the ebook’s dominance is clear: Production costs are lower and profits are higher (despite the fact that ebooks typically sell for less than half of what hardcovers sell for).
 
With the full support of Amazon, authors have rebelled against traditional publishing houses, seeking a higher percentage of royalties or threatening to publish on their own – Bowker Identifier Services claims that self-published book titles grew 60% from 2011 to 2012 alone. Writers who never thought they would be able to publish are taking advantage of the new technology.
 
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Are America’s Schools Failing?

students-classroomA headline in the December 2013 issue of The Atlantic claimed that American schools compared to the rest of the world—the members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—were “expensive, unequal, bad at math.” Their conclusion was based upon American student performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment in 2012. Far East countries such as China, Korea, and Japan were top performers, while most European and Scandinavian countries ranked higher than the U.S. as well. Even the country’s former Cold War competitor, the Russian Federation, ranked higher than the United States in the assessment.
 
At the same time, Universitas 21, a global network of research-intensive universities, ranked the American higher education system—its colleges and universities—as the best in the world in 2014, a rank it has retained for years. It is also the reason that foreign students flock to the United States from around the globe.
 
So what is the truth about the American school system? Is it a success or a failure? What should we expect from our schools, and how can we improve them?

History of Public Education in the United States

Contrary to popular belief, the right to an “education” is not mentioned in the Constitution. In the early years of the republic, public education was considered important to the nation’s progress as evidenced by the granting of more than 77 million acres of public domain to the individual states for the support of public schools. At the same time, the responsibility for education was delegated to state and local governments. The Federal Government was not heavily involved in the administration of public education until the end of the Civil War, establishing the original Office of Education in 1867.
 
It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the Federal Government assumed a dominant position in the administration of education, primarily stimulated by racial discrimination. A second driver for the Federal Government’s increased role was the perceived failure of the state-run schools, especially in science and math, compared to national rivals. The passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was in direct response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik as a consequence of the general perception that “American schools and colleges were not producing the quantity and quality of scientific and technical specialists necessary to keep pace with the Soviet Union.”
 
As a consequence, the first federal student loans capitalized with U.S. Treasury funds for college students in science, math, and foreign languages were instituted. Since that time, financial assistance has alternated between direct loans capitalized with U.S. Treasury funds and loans from private parties secured by federal guarantees.
 
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