The Martian View of Education: Infrastructure Problem
Be a Martian for a second. You just landed in Texas. You know nothing about politics or government, and you are looking to see what these humans are up to — to judge them by their deeds.
Have a look at what they are building over here. These Texans have a system for educating their children, for giving them the basic information and skills they’ll need to function as adults, culturally, intellectually and economically. They seem to have a theory about building human capital, a notion that public education will enrich the citizens and the society in an ongoing, self-replenishing cycle.
But the machine the Texans built to accomplish all of that doesn’t work the same way for every part of its population. In fact, the biggest problems are in the fastest-growing part of the population. It’s a supply-chain issue: if the state is dependent on an educated population, and if a growing part of the population isn’t getting that education, then the future of that society might not be what the designers had in mind.
As of 2010, 40.4 percent of the state’s Hispanics older than 25 had completed something less than a high school education, according to the United States Census Bureau. Another 25.8 percent topped out their education with high school diplomas, and only 11.6 percent had college degrees. Compare that with Anglos: 8 percent of those adults didn’t finish high school, 25.3 percent stopped with a diploma and 34.1 percent had college degrees.
That’s now.
Read the rest at the link below…
(Source: texastribune.org)
