Swimming without a suit

[mike777]

I have been wondering about longer school years. In this case summer school.

I always went to summer school at all levels including grad work.

 

I have heard of studies that suggest those students most at risk lose/forgot alot over the summer. I think it helped me.

[RichMor]

Friedman seems to assume or imply that all we need to do is ramp up our educational system, stand back, and watch the economy soar.

 

IMO, this assumption should be examined.

Would you accept "necessary but not sufficient?"

Absolutely !

 

In 'flat world 2.0', learning is a continuous necessity. Even IT geezers like me have to keep up with the technology.

 

But as you say, it's not sufficient.

 

RichM

[pigpenz]

I think the article was inspired by a column by Paul Krugman a week earlier inthe times. In that article Warren Buffet said when the tide goes out you see who are swimming with out suits, referring to when the recession kicks in.....in the article he was talking about how Banking needed to become a boring job again. the Wall Street and Banking sectors were talking away all of the brightest students because of the easy money there.

 

So if you go back and read this article then Friedmans makes a little more sense, but dont really know for sure where he got his stats from.

[PassedOut]

David Leonhardt's interview with Barack Obama gave the president an opening to discuss education in the US: After the Great Recession

 

Staying on the Great Depression, it led to a surge in high-school graduation. A high-school diploma during that decade or two went from being elite to the norm, and it became a ticket to the middle class. I’m curious what you think today’s ticket to the middle class is. Do you want everybody aspiring to a four-year-college degree? Is a two-year or vocational degree enough? Or is simply attending college, whether or not you graduate, sufficient to reach the middle class?

 

THE PRESIDENT: We set out a goal in my speech to the joint session that said everybody should have at least one year of post-high-school training. And I think it would be too rigid to say everybody needs a four-year-college degree. I think everybody needs enough post-high-school training that they are competent in fields that require technical expertise, because it’s very hard to imagine getting a job that pays a living wage without that — or it’s very hard at least to envision a steady job in the absence of that.

 

And so to the extent that we can upgrade not only our high schools but also our community colleges to provide a sound technical basis for being able to perform complicated tasks in a 21st-century economy, then I think that not only is that good for the individuals, but that’s going to be critical for the economy as a whole.

 

I want to emphasize, though, that part of the challenge is making sure that folks are getting in high school what they need as well. You know, I use my grandmother as an example for a lot of things, but I think this is telling. My grandmother never got a college degree. She went to high school. Unlike my grandfather, she didn’t benefit from the G.I. Bill, even though she worked on a bomber assembly line. She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —

 

Today, you mean?

 

THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School. So part of the function of a high-school degree or a community-college degree is credentialing, right? It allows employers in a quick way to sort through who’s got the skills and who doesn’t. But part of the problem that we’ve got right now is that what it means to have graduated from high school, what it means to have graduated from a two-year college or a four-year college is not always as clear as it was several years ago.

 

And that means that we’ve got to — in our education-reform agenda — we’ve got to focus not just on increasing graduation rates, but we’ve also got to make what’s learned in the high-school and college experience more robust and more effective.

Obama also extolls the value of a liberal arts degree that doesn't relate specifically to job skills.

 

I found the entire interview worth reading. Obama strikes me as very bright, and imbued with a lot of common sense.