Is Education Relevant
One of the questions with which I have wrestled for a while now is the question of what it means to be ‘educated’. The problem, of course, is that there is no one definition and that, I think, creates much of the problem in evaluating educational programs. The state of Georgia recently put on the ballot a bill that would create an “Opportunity School District”. In an effort to address “failing” schools, the state proposed taking them over and doing whatever is necessary to ‘improve’ outcomes. As I pondered the proposal, one of the questions that I continually confronted was what does it mean for school to “fail”? Who determines this? And, on what is it based? Advertisements for the plan suggested that “only 12% of third graders in our failings schools are reading on grade-level.” That, of course, raised other questions for me. For example, how does this compare to third graders in those schools that are not considered to be failing? What does it mean to read on grade level? Recognizing that people learn at different rates and that skills such as reading are commonly dependent on external factors such as how much reading goes on in the home, is the standard even appropriate? These and several other questions brought me back around to the question of what it means to be educated.