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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The system has never worked for everyone. I think it was designed for social conditions that don’t widely exist anymore: native English speaker w/o disabilities from a two parent household with a SAHM, non-college bound because there were lots of entry-level jobs at fair enough wages for 18 year olds with a HS diploma. If you could read a newspaper or cookbook, write thank you notes, and add and subtract enough to balance a checkbook, you were going to survive. Soft skills like being on time and a firm handshake got you a job and your boss had you trained in anything else you needed. My relatives who are late Boomers/early Gen X mostly lack 4 year degrees, but they own houses, nice cars, boats, went to Disney with the kids and take cruises or European tours. Their own kids are shut out of that. So a new education system is needed. More high-tech vocational. Graduate HS with as many CS certifications as you can get.[/quote]
There is truth to this, but it's also true that some of the "soft skills" you are taking for granted, like a firm handshake and knowing how to be on time, are not necessarily things that children learn in all households. For families facing housing insecurity, circumstances can make it very difficult to show up reliably on time for their jobs, which means that their kids also don't learn these skills. And it's difficult to learn what an appropriate grip for a handshake is when you don't have any member of your family who has worked in a white collar/office setting where this kind of greeting is the norm.

I don't know the solution, since I also think that public education should be about educated children to be informed citizens of a democratic society...but I think it's important to recognize the pressures that many of our cultural and social failures to reckon with extreme income and racial disparity place on public education. It's not clear to me that public schools should be forced to teach basic hygiene, nutrition, and life skills...but in some cases that is the only stability a child has. How do you balance these disparities?[/quote]

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