Interesting juxtaposition between these two quotes from your second article:

“We know that the Occupy Wall Street protest is partly a response to corporate greed, but I suspect it also reflects the disconnect between our aspirations and our reality.”

vs

“Mrs. Babb affixed a gold star to each page and lovingly pinned them to the bulletin board, silently affirming that yes, these jobs are waiting for you IF YOU WORK HARD.”  (emphasis mine)

IF these protests go beyond corporate greed, then it should speak to the enormous disconnect between young people’s view of their work and its worth versus reality.  We have discussed at length (and some not all that long ago) their sense of entitlement and self importance.

Although some of that view is nurtured in the classroom; the home and pop culture also need to shoulder some of the burden of that blame.  I call it ‘hockey mom’ syndrome - it doesn’t matter how well or poorly their child plays you can hear these parents (no they are not all moms) in the stands cheering as if their kid was already better than Gretzky.  Oddly enough, that same attitude is displayed towards teachers and guidance counselors.  Try telling an angry parent that because their child got 55% in grade 12 math, they will not be eligible to study engineering at university.

I have a pet theory about all of this - I call it my investment theory.  Parents invest enormous sums of money in their children these days.  Hockey fees are nearing the thousand dollar / year mark; equipment (and they have to have the best) is expensive, then there are hockey schools, yadda, yadda, yadda.  School is the same:  instead of a $3.99 calculator at Staples, they have to buy their kid the latest scientific model, the best laptop, smart phones, and dozens of other expensive gadgets.  ... All in expectation that by giving their children all the bells and whistles that their parents didn’t give them, their children will do so much better - and when they fail, it has to be somebody’s fault.

Somewhere along the line in the last 40 years, we have equated having the best OPPORTUNITY to succeed with the best ABILITY.  Parents have substituted investing in gadgets for investing in time with their children helping them with their homework, their attitudes towards school and success on so on.

PS: I’m counting the parents here at SQE as the EXCEPTION to the rule.  By being here, you are already showing more interest in your children’s education than 99% of your cohort.  (How do I calculate this figure?  I have sat through 50 parent/teacher nights in my career, and have met about half a dozen parents that I really needed to speak to - parents of kids that were struggling.  Most parents that show up have ‘A’ students - coincidence?)

Oh Wayne, you certainly do a good job on stereo-typing parents, their behaviours and actions, that is more or less the carbon copies of literature found on the education sites defending some aspect of the public education system.

I take it you never attending a swimming meet?  A lesson that would put the hockey moms who praise every little move, to shame. The swimming moms believe in competition, and some go way overboard, by providing edges that amounts to cheating, so their child can picked up the gold medal at the end of the day.However the national swimming association and the provincial counterparts have counter it, by enforcement of rules and high standards. So unlike the other sporting organizations, that has not done much concerning parents, who are insisting that all children received a medal, or no team can win two games in a row. I would think twice to enrolled any of my children in sports activities, let along spend money, to what amounts is the dogma and ideology that stems from the education systems, where competition is a dirty word, along with standard achievement tests.

“Somewhere along the line in the last 40 years, we have equated having the best OPPORTUNITY to succeed with the best ABILITY.  Parents have substituted investing in gadgets for investing in time with their children helping them with their homework, their attitudes towards school and success on so on.”

If this is the case, supplying opportunities without the tools, and the means to access the opportunities, is what is practiced as daily fare in the public education system. A child who is struggling in read, and told by the school, if your child reads 300 books starting now, by grade 3 he or she will become a good reader. Just one of the numerous example, where the parents learned that accessing opportunities is no longer dependent on the skills of the reader. From some parents, it works for their children, and for others they still have children who have not become very good readers at the end of the grade 2. What did both set of parents learn, the payoff is in the opportunity, and not in the fact that their children may be in need of remediation, Most parents don’t wake up, until the later grades of high schools, because like their children, have swallow, hook, line and sinker that foundation skills can be learned at any time, and is not dependent on learning advance knowledge.

At the end of the article, “Occupy Wall Street is not just about deadlock, dysfunction and disenfranchisement. It is about our nation’s willingness to over-promise and under-educate. It is about the urgent need to finally get serious about making our education system worthy of our ambition.”

That says it all, but here is another article that articulates the nasty business of social mobility, and how it impacts people’s expectations as well as the education systems relating to policies.
“In our book The Meritocracy Myth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), we challenge the validity of these commonly held assertions, by arguing that there is a gap between how people think the system works and how the system actually does work. We refer to this gap as “the meritocracy myth,” or the myth that the system distributes resources—especially wealth and income—according to the merit of individuals.”
http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v21/merit.htm

Where the public education system has become a barrier to social mobility. And is one of the many reasons why the Occupy protests have taken root. A mismatch between reality and what was promised….....

Nancy,

I’ll quote this as well:  At the end of the article, “Occupy Wall Street is not just about deadlock, dysfunction and disenfranchisement. It is about our nation’s willingness to over-promise and under-educate. It is about the urgent need to finally get serious about making our education system worthy of our ambition.”  Did you happen to notice that the example given in the article was a young person who attended university, and then an ‘Ivy League’  grad school?  Maybe you might call this person under-educated, I wouldn’t

You should have noticed my emphasis on the word IF.  In other words, although there may be some analogies to the education system, it is a HUGE stretch to say the the Occupy Wall Street protests are about a lack of educational opportunity - that is grossly unfair to the millions of people struggling to earn a living in this ‘1% world’ and HAVE a good education.

It starts early, with the promise of, if students work hard, they will get their dream job. Or the promise to parents, that there child will catch up, in response to parents worrying about the 3 Rs. Or the overall education system, as well as other parts of society, pushing all to get a degree, and the reward will be a good paying job. Than the universities and colleges more intent on filling seats, collecting revenue from the tuitions, that have been increasing faster than the pace of inflation, pushing students further into debt. Only to turn around, there is very few good paying jobs left in their fields, because the baby boomers are electing to stay on and not retire, because the economic crisis or globalization has hurt their pensions and even perhaps paying off the mortgage. Only to turn around, and discovered to apply for some jobs, one needs to become a member of an union. So many thousand of dollars in debt, reduce to taking any job, without benefits, to fend off the debt collectors calling at home.

On the whole, the public education system does a very lousy job on matching and predicting job markets. Something that the major corporate companies, as well as government, is an increase in the number of students entering the sciences and maths at the post secondary. The only feat that has been accomplished, is reducing the number of students in maths and science, because the students are not enrolling in maths and sciences fields, due to less than stellar grades in high school, or the absent of senior high school math and science courses.  Than comes the highly skilled immigrants swooping the jobs, because their skills are better suited than the skills of Canadians.

Below is a link of the life of a person with a MBA. Mind you, a MBA use to have value, not so much today.

.http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

Just copy and paste the link in search or address bar.

>>Although some of that view is nurtured in the classroom; the home and pop culture also need to shoulder some of the burden of that blame. <<

Absolutely, I agree 100%.
The schools breed a lot of that attitude every day in the classrooms, but we have what we have today because what happens in the classroom reflects the society’s cultural attitudes.

There is tremenduous silent pressure against the parents that do not believe in these so-called progressive, child-centered methods of education and who dare express their opinions both from the school and from other parents.

Such parents are made to feel non-loving, bad-parents, cruel, behind the times, having unrealistic expectations that put too much pressure on the kids, elitist and without a social conscience, ... you name it. Pretty much Doug’s arguments in one shape or another perhaps just packaged more politely.

Somehow, a lot of parents equate love not with training your child to become at a minimum a responsible and self-sufficient adult but to accepting pretty much anything from your child in the name of nurturing their self-esteem.

Sure, it’s harder to teach perseverance and self-discipline. It’s harder to teach your child to set goals and try to reach them.

Much easier to buy them stuff, to try and ignore bad behavior hoping it would magically correct itself in time so that you can have unencumbered fun and special moments with your child.

Really some parents are like big kid themselves. They just want to feel good at the end of a long workday and in many cases a long commute while feeling they are good parents. The solution? Lug the kids around to all sorts of organized sports and activities so that the children are yet again managed and helped by other people.
Or even worse, let the kids on the computer as soon as they come home under the excuse that anyway at least they learn something and that they are safe.

In this case, I don’t think it’s the education system that is to blame so much as it is the fact that we over-promise what education will automatically do, in terms of financial prospects.  I can recall reading about well-educated twenty-somethings in Lagos, Nigeria being astonished that when they presented themselves to their society with newly-minted university degrees, there were no jobs awaiting. 

Reminds me of my own story.  Don’t get me wrong….I am a huge advocate of good education, but I did learn that 1)  it means nothing if the folks offering the jobs don’t appreciate good education too,  and 2) there have to be jobs available, period, or the best education will not pay your mortgage. 

I know whereof I speak.  I left a doctoral program at an excellent university back in the 80s, with several academically top-notch degrees already under my belt.  I was at that time paying monthly on the enormous U.S. student loans I had had to take out for my previous years of grad school (the private loan program did not wait until you were no longer a student to collect their pound of flesh).  It came down to either paying my loans, or eating.  And as I was not going to renege on financial contracts (call me silly….I have a conscience), I had to leave school and find work.  After nearly 8 years as a good student in unrelentingly challenging university programs, what did I get?  I became a sales clerk at a department store, part-time, as they could not offer me full-time hours.  Paid minimum wage.  I could pay my student loan, and eat —just.  There was absolutely nothing else available at the time, between two moderately-sized cities where I lived (even moved to one from the other, for job prospects).

For 11 years I worked minimum wage jobs, including term work for the Public Service, at the very lowest rung in the bureacracy.  Don’t get me going on that…...I was filing paperwork 8 hours a day on topics that I could have taught seminars on, while my managers were folks who had barely scraped through grade 9, but were friendly with the right special interest groups, and hence ended up in positions of authority.  I often had to dumb-down the vocabulary I used in order to communicate with my bosses.  And still I remained a bottom-of-barrel clerk, despite entering any number of “selection processes”. 

It was not until I was in my 40s that I managed to get a job anywhere near suitable for someone with more than a high school education of any sort, nevermind graduate degrees. 

So when I hear the self-righteous demands of the OWS rabble, I try very, very hard to tune out their ugly notions of entitlement.  And I still struggle over whether I should teach my own children to “do the right thing” by geting a good education, or to do whatever it will take to get them a paying job, if there are indeed any available when they hit adulthood.

Jan, my oldest went from one low-paying job to the next, and at presently she is in a job that is below her qualifications, but it does have some benefits and perks. For my youngest, a different story altogether, and by the time she was was entering grade 5, I already noted the lack of jobs, and in particular the good paying jobs. Observed and heard the complaints of the young adults, that you have to know someone, to get a job and/or become a member of a union, to be able to applied for jobs in the trades. The thousands of newly minted teachers looking for job, and every few months it becomes a hot issue on the radio talk shows.

Beneath the surface of the OWS movement, lies the real concerns that are the valid and big problems in today’s society, through no fault of their own. Policies of government and big business created the problems, and what may be self-righteous demands of the OWS, are really the hard choices that must be made by individuals, regardless of their education levels. You ought to look at the students loan set-ups for either Canada or United States, it is far worse now than when you were applying for student loans.

As for my youngest, who was the one with the learning problems, my only intentions were to have that solid foundation beneath her feet. Never in my wildest dreams, would that dream of a solid foundation would bear fruit, where she is doing wonderfully well in maths and sciences in her high school senior years. Beyond my expectations, where she is one of the runners for the top scholarships despite her LD, and right along the side of the students who use to call her dumb. My youngest will be entering post-secondary in the science fields,  where there is a high demand for jobs, and not enough people to fill them.

Thanks, Nancy.  Just to clarify, I paid my own way entirely through my first four years of university.  I was a double major as an undergrad, and at the same time as being a full-time student, I worked two different minimum wage jobs to the tune of 35 hrs. per week; I had to give up sleeping.  I lived off-campus, on my own, had no other support of any kind, and either walked or took unreliable buses to get everywhere.  I did not so much as apply for a student loan until after those initial four years.  The graduate program I needed was not offered in Canada, so I studied thereafter in the U.S. and Europe, where I paid foreign student fees on top of already expensive tuitions.

When I hear relatively well-off middle class Canadian university students of today complain about tuition rates, I recall that by 1983 I was paying over $12,000 U.S. per year for my program, plus living expenses, plus travel expenses, plus interest that began accruing the day I took out the loan.  I concurrently worked a two-semester internship which was entirely unpaid.  Sorry, but try as I might, I truly cannot weep for most university students in North America of today. 

A dozen years ago I sent my child to a private 1/2 day kindergarten, due to his special needs (though this kindergarten offered no particular remediation).  It cost us far more than the tuition for a full year at any Canadian university of the time.  When I heard students whining everywhere, I reminded them that half-time private kindergarten costs more per year than full-time university.  They still didn’t get it. 

By 1980, with the first real recession setting in, jobs had dried up everywhere.  Sorry, but a generation ago many of us had it harder than students do today….we just didn’t pout and posture in public squares…..we went out and took minimum wage jobs, worked overtime even, and got on with life.  My husband and I could not scrape together a down-payment for our first tiny townhouse until we were almost 40, because my student loans (for graduate work alone) had topped out at nearly $100,000, when interest was added.  I paid back every penny, on mainly minimum wage jobs.

Jan, can it be done in today’s economic climate?

A lot of students coming out, are so much in debt, that they end up filing for bankruptcy. I hear the stories of repaying back to the tune of $500 per month, which in turn prevents the person from buying a car, to everything in between. Internships, with no pay, and as long as a year. One story that I read in the newspaper, is that the students who are still living at home, and the parents are willing to pay for their expenses, just to get some experience in their field. The main theme, is that companies are taking advantage of the graduates, rather than hiring full time positions.

I come from a different perspective where unemployment is back up to 23 percent, and the only jobs are in another province call Alberta. Men and women go back and forth, and the children are raise in NL, because housing is so expensive in Alberta. Hard way to live life for families, and in some communities, it is women that are operating the volunteer fire department, the local town council, and become the labour force for the town.  Not many jobs around, and for the most part do not require a high level of education. And what is difficult, we can only watch as the fishery and forestry industries are dismantled, and the elimination of the small independents and owners of small vessels, to the globalized version. 

I am not a lover of globalization, and I probably never will be, but globalization economic policies is more of a curse to the standard of living, domestic jobs and the levels of education that people processed.

I hear you, Nancy.  I came from the Maritimes too, and went through everything you talk about.  I paid more than $500 per month in student loans, back in the 80s!  I didn’t have a car or a home of my own until after I hit 40, and even then they were nothing elaborate.  No furniture either, come to think of it.  And this was after having worked hard enough and long enough to be in a doctoral program.  I wonder how many realize what that takes.  Do you know what kind of grueling unpaid studying I did simply to keep up in university?  So why are today’s students so much worse off?  My internship was a little over a year, and totally unpaid too.  It was very difficult, but I really don’t see how today’s youth are so badly off in comparison, as you think.  My husband and I even had to delay our family until late in life to cover our financial difficulties first.  At least the folks you talk about could go ahead and have families…....  Just why was my experience acceptable, but theirs is not?

Looking back at your comment. Nancy, about “today’s economic climate”, I already mentioned that in 1980 (the year I graduated from university with my first degree) Canada and the U.S. hit the first real recession since the 1930s.  After the Depression, until 1980 —barring the war years —there had been upward prosperity all the way.  The year I graduated, jobs had disappeared in great number, and the early Baby Boom cohort before me had gotten all the jobs worth having anyway.  There simply were no jobs above minimum wage to be had for love nor money in my area of the country, and not many even in the more prosperous places.  Why is that so different from the present?  I worked minimum wage jobs for over a decade —sometimes 14 hours a day — to live at a basic level and to pay off student loans for a superb education that got me absolutely nowhere.  Come to think of it, had I gone right into a minimum wage job from high school, I would have been in the labour force those eight years I was studying at university instead (and making a wage), and I would not have run up a flabbergasting student loan, just from my graduate studies —to pay for all of that education.  The result after eight years of the almost tortuous toil as a student (while working 35 hrs. a week as a clerk at the same time)?  The result was that I had no job at all for several weeks, and was living on week-old bananas, as I recall, sleeping on a friend’s couch.  Then…..back to a minimum wage job with zero benefits, halfway across town.  I keep asking —- why are today’s students so much worse off, supposedly?  And my situation did improve any time soon.

Could it be no hope, to own a home? No hope to see their way through the mountain of debt? No hope in the upward spiral of rising consumer prices of basic necessities and services? 

Not under the current economic system in my eyes. I am worried about my youngest, where once in a while I tried to steer her into thinking of other job fields, that will have less of a price tag to be paid at the end of the day. But I am afraid I created a tiger, itching to prove herself to others that once upon a time, called her dumb. My youngest is quite determined to carry out her dreams, but the only comfortable silent thought of mine, is that she has the skills and ability to carry out her dreams. She seems so confident that she will be able to carry the debts, because I cannot help her. Unless $50 a week is a help. She better off, when I died, but when is the great question. She is so confident that she will land her dream job in the science field, and a good paying one to boot, and she repeats the threat when I do, it be time to put you in a retirement home. You see, I am one of the old mothers, and if she does do what she says, I be pushing on the wrong side of 65.

And so I too wonder, if my youngest knows what it takes and the sacrifices to be made, that were not obstacles in the 70s. And I wonder about others and the economic turmoil that seems to dictate so much of our daily lives. Oh well, at least she is not into celebrity watching, or thinking of boyfriends, but actually studying for her math unit test. Or for that matter, reality shows. She likes watching the science shows. So unlike me, but I read the National Geographic,when I was young, and subscribe to until it was another item to dropped in the household budget. Perhaps, a needed quality is determination in today’s uncertainly, and Jan, you certainly displayed this quality. Maybe it is the missing item in today’s youth, and a sign of the times we are living in. But there is a sense of hopelessness too, of not having the basic things such as owning a home with the standard picket fence, two kids, a back yard and having enough to pay for the basics that seems to become a growing list these days.

I understand your concerns, Nancy, and you have my condolences.  I just think you are purposely avoiding the topic we are on, though.  I notice a lot of people play the avoidance game when something they don’t want to see make sense, does make sense.  They change topics or look the other way.

My last line earlier was meant to say, “And my situation did not improve anytime soon.”  Again, why was that situation, then, O.K., but the poor darlings of today are not to put up with anything less than the very best?  I notice so often that when I tell this story, to people weeping and moaning over the OWS crowd, they simply change the subject.  The truth is a demanding mistress.  Anyway, I will not be bringing those attention-seeking poseurs brownies and hot chocolate in their cozy encampments any time soon.  The less attention you give them, the sooner they will get bored and go away, leaving a mess for municipal authorities to clean up out of our tax monies, no doubt.   

Wayne, your comment here is very appropriate:

” it is a HUGE stretch to say the the Occupy Wall Street protests are about a lack of educational opportunity - that is grossly unfair to the millions of people struggling to earn a living in this ‘1% world’ and HAVE a good education.”

I see the OWS movement as a parade of spoiled brats shouting “look at me, look at me, aren’t I wonderful; when am I going to get the $125,000 job that I deserve, with my newly-minted B.A.?”  In the city in which I live, I pass many signs in store/restaurant windows in our downtown area every day, saying they are hiring.  The signs are up for weeks at any given place, sometimes permanently.  Minimum wage not good enough for you, kids?  I did it for 11 solid years after I had been almost at the point of being able to put a Ph.D. after my name, an honour I worked bloody hard for.  Can’t make it on minimum wage?  Well,  neither could you make it into the middle class way of life in the 1980s on minimum wage, including paying off enormous student loans. I can tell you all about that.  But my husband and I did it.  We worked two jobs apiece for several years,  spending about $30 a week on groceries.  AND WE WERE HIGHLY EDUCATED!!!!  Not good enough for today’s group, who for the most part glided through school without putting in too much effort?  Boo, hoo.  The sooner their orgy of self-entitlement fizzles out and they get to work —at whatever is available —the better.  OWS is a festival of self-centredness.  You’re right, Wayne.  It has nothing to do with education.

No, I am not trying to change the subject. Nor will I be bringing hot chocolate to them anytime soon, since I live too far away from urban centres. Neither was the type either to give coffee to the teachers’ strikes, or one of the health unions on strike. But always sympathetic to the strikes of ordinary people, mining the raw resources, that makes urban living a possibility. I am no longer rooted to the urban way of life, but the rural way of life. Would love to see signs in the rural areas like the hiring signs in the cities, Minimum wage is quite acceptable in rural areas where there is high unemployment, and seen all too often, the graduates come home to roost and take on any job, to pay the student loans.

I think the difference lies in that I see the negative consequences of bad policies, poor planning, that impact rural areas, resulting in paying more, and doing with less and less. By the way, how did you do it with $30 a week in the 80s? If I remember it correctly, groceries was costing me $50 for 3, with the additional costs of milk and cheese. But that remain steady until the 1990s, and groceries have been on the upward swing every since than, as well as everything else.

Should we just accept the rising prices in the basics, that is eroding and eating away on the excess cash left over, which isn’t much these days? Somehow when I look at the OWS crowd, I see young, middle-age, retired people, marines, and everything in between. The OWS crowd is not exclusively composed of young people, however the camps are composed of the younger people.

I still believe that the public education system, and society as a whole, have over promise and under educated. The day my youngest came home beaming with her 50 % grade, and said so proudly, see my star Mom, is the image that comes to my mind. It was her proof, she no longer needed the tutoring at home, because she was told a 50 percent is just as good as a 80 percent. To me it is under educating, and creating false promises that meets the harsh realities of the world in the future.

Nancy,

“Would love to see signs in the rural areas like the hiring signs in the cities, Minimum wage is quite acceptable in rural areas where there is high unemployment ... ”  that has been the plight of the rural areas since the industrial revolution began over 200 years ago.  Today’s information revolution has only heightened the differences - concentrating the wealth and the jobs in a few, select areas like Silicon Valley and Japan (Waterloo and Kanata if you want Canadian examples). 

You can’t blame society and the education system when people do not see something that has been self-evident for generations.  Furthermore, when did it ever become the education system’s job to predict the job market?  The only place that ever held true was behind the Iron Curtain.  I remember talks with my aunt and uncle back in the late 70’s when I was finishing high school.  They couldn’t understand how anyone with the marks and the money could simply apply for any post-secondary program they wanted.  They could not understand how I was supposed to know what to study without the state telling me where the jobs were.  I had to tell them that if I got it wrong, then I would have wasted a lot of time and money.  My cousin in comparison was sent to trade school - university was not an option ... my uncle did not have the Party connections, and having two brothers who defected to the West, no job that might lead to international travel was an option.  So, my cousin resigned himself to trade school and wanted to be a millwright like his father.  Unfortunately, they didn’t need millwrights that year - he had the choice of plumber, electrician or upholsterer.

In our free market economy, everything including jobs goes by the law of supply and demand.  So:  rural areas have few job opportunities because the employer demand is not there (despite the available labour pool) whereas cities have lots of jobs (generally) and a limited labour pool (hence the help wanted signs).  The same holds true for your comment about ‘MBA’s used to mean something’ - yes, when there were like 5 people in North America that had those degrees.  Now that there are tens of thousands of them, they don’t mean so much - the supply has overfilled the demand.

Jan is correct, it is sometimes difficult to get the work that you want, but blaming the system isn’t the answer.  Remember Ms. Babb in the original article.