Back then, most of us seemed to have a broad idea of what we wanted to do in life and concenytated on the things and subjects that would help us get there. If we wanted to go farming we had to be good enough in reading and writing through secondary school and pick up the rest on the farm. If you wanted to be a public servant you needed good “character” and good enough results at secondary school and then get trained on the job.

Now I sense that education is a “good” in it’s own right and more about life skills than a vehicle to a particular job. I think a lot of kids have no particular job goal for the future beyond having a look round once they finish school and are quite happy to just wander in and out of different jobs until they find something they quite like or responsibilities catch up with them.

Way back, I think teachers were more proactive in steering pupils of different abilities into suitable jobs. I can recall the old post Master at Masterton telling me he often got rung by teachers who would give an honest assessment of a slow pupil but say he was dead honest and could deliver mail or somesuch… perhaps a reflection of smaller schools and more interaction with the local community.

JC

I cannot find the material, but from somewhere I seem to remember poor whites and blacks are the worst affected, but I may well be wrong.

Part of the problem may lie also in how schools are funded, primarily through property taxes, I think. This coupled with for example in New York City a teachers union where promotion and pay are dependent on years of service leads to considerable difficulties in the public school system.

In fact at the end of the day, it may well be surprising that children come out of the system as well as they do in many cases.

Remember, there are an awful lot of poor people in the US, where the real wages of the majority have only risen for a few years since the oil shocks of the mid-1970s (under Clinton). These people are struggling, and increasingly not well served by the public school system.

“Too much free market” was indeed a glib remark designed to provoke, but it was designed to provoke a thoughtful response.

I think ‘too much free market’ is a pat remark, which is perhaps unworthy of you. I suspect the reasons are more complex.

Yet one key indicator suggests real cause for concern: the declining high school graduation rate, which affects the supply of those seeking to go to college. This too has been a bitterly contested statistic in the US. The country’s highly decentralised education system causes a proliferation of conflicting data sources and definitions. But a recent careful study by Nobel laureate James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine found that the high school graduation rate “has been falling for 40 years” and that this “explains part of the recent slowdown in college attendance”

It would be interesting to know what has happened in NZ over the same period?

Have you any ideas why this is happening in the world’s most powerful economy, and the bastion of free market thinking to boot? Wait, could that be it? Too much free market? Taxes cut too much? There’s something to think about!