Postby Mask6184 » Wed Mar 16, 2016 7:51 pm
The biggest issue in education (at leas in the US), in my opinion, is the broken K-12 public education system, something that I don't hear about anywhere, especially from a lot of our presidential candidates. They keep focusing on college, college, college instead of the public school systems.
Decades ago, it use to be that if you had a high school diploma, you can get a job and work your way up from the bottom. Now, unless you're very adventurous, the mentality is to get a 4 year bachelors degree to even have a shot at a decent paying job, unless you're a professional athlete, star, etc. Bernie Sanders' solution is to have the government (or taxpayers to be more accurate) cover the costs of a bachelor degree for public colleges. It sounds good in theory, except it's just throwing money at the problem. He even talks about the high school diploma being what you need in the past to get your foot in the door. Well, why not reform the K-12 system so that when students graduate high school, the will have the equivalent skills and knowledge of someone with a bachelors degree today. How to do that is the question, but one suggestion I would offer is that in the higher grades, the curriculum for each student should be specialized for a student's career path. I think one of the candidates, John Kasich, mentioned having the school system reformed to reflect the current job market.
As for the cost of college, especially for those who seek more advanced degrees, contrary to public opinion, I believe that the student loans, especially from both the private and public sector, need to stop. From a business standpoint, the loans are risky to offer because it depends on a student completing college and landing a job to help pay it off, in which there are so few off. Also, it changes the customer (i.e, who is directly paying the college). In this case, it would be the banks and the state, whom have deep enough pockets, the colleges can charge high tuition rates to take advantage of, and the banks and state would worry about the students paying them back. Plus the colleges can directly bill the student for other fees, including textbooks. If you take away the middle man, the college would have to directly get their tuition from the students, whom may not have deep pockets. The college would have to price their tuition in order to not only maximize revenue per student, but to be able to maximize the number of students entering into college. Heck, they can even reduce or eliminate those extra costs of fees, room & board, textbooks, etc.
Regarding the discussion of political indoctrination in school, it's difficult to say because the student's views could either align or disagree with the teacher's views, which could explain why some people may not have experienced it, but I do agree a clear sign of it is if the teacher gives an opinionated assignment, and the teacher gives a student a lower grade because the student's opinion is different from the teacher's opinion, even though the student is able to defend his opinion in the assignment.
Those are my thoughts. Fill free to agree or disagree.