Compared to other countries, maybe our educational system is much more fluid, flexible, and effective than he thinks. It's certainly less stratified and more upwardly mobile than that in almost any other industrialized country. And let's remember, there is a glass ceiling of sorts in regards to homeschooling in this age of two-wage-earner households: It only works when someone is home.
Bill Barrett
San Francisco, CA
"School's Out" makes homeschooling sound a lot better than I've known it to be. Daniel Pink sees home-schooled kids as "independent learners" full of authenticity who "define success on their own terms." I've seen homeschooled kids coming to college thinking, sounding, and even looking exactly like their parents. This has made me appreciate the positive force of school as a bridge between home and society-at-large. Homeschooling more or less equals provincialism.
Pink also begs questions of how "free agents" will construct civic life. The metaphor takes off from professional sports, and the experience of real free agency there should make Pink and others reassess their enthusiasm. There's little continuity to team rosters, and the quality of play suffers greatly. Fans cannot identify with the transient, mercenary players; all that's left is (as Jerry Seinfeld noted) laundry -- what the uniform looks like on different guys, all selfishly trying to pad their statistics to get a better contract. Good luck building a good society on these principles.
Pink also comes across in print as quite the philistine. He suspects that "fancy colleges" will suffer under free agency, showing no appreciation that education has value beyond credentialing and social networking. He gushes that millionaires come out of the ranks of undereducated free agents, but I've met a number of them, and sorry, they are, to a person, boors. Big damn deal they have money to burn on SUVs, pretentious restaurants, and mega-stereos on which to play their Kenny G and John Tesh discs.
Jeff Zorn
San Francisco, CA
"People's need for knowledge doesn't respect semesters. They'll want higher education just in time -- and if that means leaving the classroom before earning a degree, so be it," writes Daniel Pink.
Yet some people see time invested in education as more than job preparation. When Franklin D. Roosevelt graduated Harvard in three years, he stayed a fourth anyway. Sure, there will always be people like Bill Gates, who left Harvard early, but I don't think anyone would accuse Gates of being a "well-rounded individual."
The future of education will be life-long learning. Much of that will come from independent reading, and taking classes here and there, even on-line. However, a college degree is worth no less now than it ever has been. There are tech careers, such as Web development, where know-how is more important than sheepskin, but throughout our history, the correlation of degrees with high salaries and low unemployment has been dramatic.
Don't bank on that changing.
Bruce Mitchell Sabin
Deltona, FL
Daniel Pink asserts that school is a modern invention, not "something we inherited from antiquity." This is utterly untrue.
Formal schooling was practiced widely and with much success in Athens in the fifth century BCE. Parents chose and paid for their teachers, and teachers competed with one another for the opportunity to serve students. In the Hellenistic era circa 200 BCE, the Athenian model of free-market education had been reproduced all over the Mediterranean. Though imperfect, these schools spread literacy beyond a tiny ruling elite to much of the free population, despite what we would consider crushing poverty and technological backwardness. Nurtured by its unregulated education system, Athens enjoyed a cultural explosion the like of which has seldom been seen since, almost single-handedly creating the Western cultural tradition and literally inventing democracy (albeit in a crude and problematic form).
Even state-run and state-funded compulsory school systems are not a recent invention. The Spartans, just a hundred miles from Athens, contemporaneously developed such a public system. It focused on military training to the exclusion of virtually all else. Neither parental choice nor dissent were tolerated. Sparta's cultural legacy, not surprisingly, amounts to little more than a useful adjective and a name for high-school football teams.
Andrew J. Coulson
Senior Fellow
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Mackinac, MI
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