I got into one of those dangerous-at-work conversations: Education. Okay, sure, it isn't generally lumped in with the Big Three topics, but still. It's something I feel very strongly about. That's all the red flag you need at work. Mind you, I stayed civil and vague and caught myself before ranting. (So I might as well do it here, eh?)
He wants his kids to go to public schools. It's not about cost. It's not about wanting to avoid anything religious. It's not even really about the prestige of the school. He wants them to excel at standardized tests.
He doesn't want his child Left Behind. But it's more than just that.
Here's some of his reasoning:
College admissions are heavily influenced by test scores. The people he recently went to college with (Masters Degree in Information Systems) seemed to succeed or fail based on whether they had mastered multiple choice questions. During his college years, he has witnessed a virtual disappearance of essay questions--replaced by multiple choice, standardized tests. ((I did hold back my suggestion that maybe he encountered a lot of idiots at college because the college admissions staff were just looking for students with high test scores...)
He recently had to re-take his driver's license test. He failed it the first time. There were no questions about turning into a skid, for example, but rote memorization questions like, "How much is the fine for parking in a handicapped space?" He seemed pretty sure that was the one question he failed the test by.
He feels strongly that in today's world, in order to succeed and get ahead, you have to know how to memorize, repeat, and score well on standardized tests.
(Maybe on our tax forms we'll just have to fill in the circles? Wouldn't that be so much simpler?)
He has even had trouble getting jobs because of his degree. Master's Degree, less experience and in today's job market? "Overqualified." He took the degree off his resume and suddenly started getting interviews.
All this paints a picture for him of the world his children are growing up in. He wants to prepare them for it. Can't blame him for that.
So I hid my horror. At least I think I did. I hope I did. But it was there, as real and cold and unavoidable as the omnipresent overcast gray sky outside.
And just as horrifying, I could understand how he could see the world like that. I couldn't argue that the world of today looks any different than that.
And yet (at least I really hope), that isn't the world my children will live in. Today is just now. It's the world of ten to twenty years from now that the children of today need to be ready for. I'm pretty sure it will be a very different world than the one we have today.
I'm pretty sure that world will need innovators, problem-solvers, creative thinkers, and articulate expressors--people who can have a unique new vision and be able to manifest it, people who can collaborate in a team and genuinely lead, not just manage people. I don't think that rote learning and standardized test skills will have a lot to do with that...
There's an article on cnn.com about how More authors turn to Web and print-on-demand publishing.
The basic idea is if you can't get a traditional publisher to publish your book, pay a company that will publish anything for a fee. These were origially called vanity presses, but now more and more of them are moving away from that name as they get digital presses. Now they're Print-On-Demand. There isn't an upfront investment, unless you want extra services, like layouts, or covers, or maybe some editing/proofreading. This is self-publishing.
It's easy to see that as a way to get published. Famous authors have self-published. In many cases because the traditional publishers didn't exist yet. Most poetry is self-published. If you want to publish a poetry book, you might have to do it yourself. That's different.
But here's why self-publishing is bad, from a novelist's perspective. Anyone can self-publish. Anyone can pay a vanity press to put out a book. It doesn't matter if the book is any good. It doesn't matter if it uses sentences or not. It might be unreadable tripe. The vanity publishers don't care. They get their money from the authors. They don't risk a dime of their own. They aren't invested in the book. They don't lose anything if the book is a dismal flop that readers hurl against the wall screaming.
The traditional publishers, on the other hand, invest fairly big money up front. They have to take a risk with every new title they put out. They aren't going to do that unless they think the book has a decent chance of success. They get huge piles of submissions. They rule out many of them just from the query letter that introduces the book. If you can't get a few paragraphs with proper grammar and spelling, they aren't going to invest time reading even a few sample pages. Some of the ideas will sound interesting. Some of them will be old ideas that have been done to death. Eventually, the publisher will find a few that they'll want to read a few sample chapters of. For the most part, they'll know in a few pages if the author can handle the language or not. Then they'll see if he can tell a story.
It's hard to get published this way. You might have to go through a dozen publishers, or a score. Some of them will tell you why they won't buy your book. Then you know what to work on. But these publishers are professionals. They've got some ideas what the readers they market to will and won't buy. They're looking for the books that will leave readers wanting more books from the same author. I'm sure Ms Rowling had to send her manuscript to quite a few publishers.
"When everyone is special, no one is."--Dash, The Incredibles.
In the academic world, you aren't published unless its a peer-reviewed work. Your peers review it to make sure you've got your facts straight, that what your saying can be backed up. To make sure it's reliable. Anyone can put their article up on a web page. Not the same.
When you buy something published by one of the traditional publishers, you can know that it has been screened, at least to some degree. It has been through some editing. (Some established authors bully their way through that process. You may have read books where the quality goes down as a series goes on. That's why...)
Anyone can put up a web site, or a blog. That isn't publishing. Publishers pay authors. Authors make a product and then sell it. With vanity publishing, you make a product and then pay to distribute it. Would you do that with any other product you make?
When I was in college ('89-93) there weren't a whole lot of people on the internet. It took some figuring out how to do anything there. So the ones that were there were having some pretty intellectual discussions. Logical debates. Thought out posts attempting to make a case or explain things. Then the Web came out, AOL got big. Spewing ideas was easy. Anyone could do it. And they did. The signal-to-noise ratio changed.
Now, I'm not going to say that all self-published books are crap, and that no traditionally published book is crap. There are gems and piles in both categories. Similarly, there are the occasional intelligently written MySpace page.
But then, these days anybody can type up a rant and click "publish" without even going back to re-read it...