The information age that ain’t.
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA.
“Education is learning what you didn’t even know you don’t know.” Daniel J. Boorstin, educator, (1914)
I was planning to write my Enron V Part VI with potential solutions to the home mortgage crisis this week when I saw an interesting article covering the sound advice of the President and Executive Director of the Boston Fed in the April 1 issue of Rumbo. He was not talking about how we got here but about how to get from under the weight of the current situation. And I know that it will be more rewarding to you if you follow his advice and go to a bank and tell them that the President and Executive Director of the Fed sent you and not a former banker like me who mostly banks online these days.
I know my advise will be repetitive of what he said or more unnecessarily detailed, so I have decided to forego Part VI and tell you to listen to him while I get into other issues that are as relevant as losing your own home, perhaps even more so. In future articles I will try to dig deeper on other more complicated mortgage crisis points that are taking shape as we speak. But for now, how does losing your children’s entire life sound like as a subject?
For the past few weeks we have witnessed a very creative competition about wakeup calls between all three of the current presidential candidates. It appears that all American crisis loom in the horizon at three o’clock in the morning; insomnia perhaps? In the three versions of the same we have seen It seems that we are all sound asleep and then suddenly the phone sounds to awaken the President to tell him or her that there is a serious crisis that only “that candidate” claims to be able to solve. I hate to use this example, but the twin towers attack took place in the early morning hours of September 11 when the President was reading children’s books in a southern school. The ad is really absorbing and powerful and makes us wonder whether our presidents have a full night sleep when they live in the White House. I have, however, come up with another wake-up call ad that might impress and affect you much more. Let’s give it a shot.
“It is dark at home. It is three o’clock in the morning and your phone rings. Yes, your phone, not the president’s. You are tired and deeply asleep and so is your spouse and your kids. You awaken and shake your head in disbelief: “Who the heck?... at three o’clock in the morning!” You approach the phone with trepidation and pick it up. It is your kid’s school principal’s voice. “Principal?... What is going on?” The voice on the other side makes a few sounds to clear the throat. “Yes, it is me,” the voice says, “I am calling to tell you that your child has dropped out from high school and is officially a failure.” “My child?... are you kidding?” The other phone clicks, goes dead and the conversation ends.”
I have to confess that I have never seen any presidential candidate phone ad sounding like the one I just completed but in honesty to you I wonder why not. Like any citizen of this country I am worried about wars and terrorism and want to make sure that the operators in the White House work 24/7 to protect us, but my interest goes beyond that risk. I am not talking only about killing me or my family but killing our children’s minds as well. The risk is very real and so is the possibility that you may get the call I just staged for you and will knock your brains out.
A recent report by America’s Promise Alliance, a respectable educational research institution, former Secretary of State Collin Powell and his wife Alma are directors there, finds that only about half of all students served by the main school systems in the nation’s 50 largest cities graduate from high school, over a million a year country wide do not graduate. The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that the high school dropouts from the Class of 2006-07 will cost the U.S. more than $329 billion in lost wages, taxes and productivity over their lifetimes. Young people of color are most affected, because nearly half of all African-American and Native-American students will not graduate with their class, while less than six in 10 Hispanic students will.
In the city of Detroit alone only 20% graduate. That is a whopping eighty percent dropout rate. The same study indicates that the incidence of those dropouts concentrates in the inner cities while the suburbs perform better. In other words, high school graduation rates have become a new social divide. I posed the possibility of not having finished High School to my current college students, obviously not in that category. I asked them a simple question: “Presume you had dropped out of High School and imagine how you would spend your days. Would you sleep, watch TV, hang around with other dropouts? What would you do with your time? And most of all, how would you be looking at your future?”
They looked at me amazed in disbelief but my intention was not to force them to compare themselves with others who had given up very early. I wanted them to realize that here we had a section or our society who obviously were not going to be their useful business customers or our work associates in a society that depends more and more on our ability to handle an ever increasing complex set of rules. In other words, in the world I operate and teach we live in a demanding information society but these students were becoming uninformed instead and staying behind. They are the lost opportunities to success who slowly but surely will fall by the wayside when it comes to economic and intellectual security. When education is not the focus and central part of our vision, other irrelevant parts in the periphery that up to now were of little value or no attraction to us become our main goals and no one knows what those parts are: sex, drugs, laziness, poverty.
Those students will grow to become expensive dependents of a tax structure where their contributions will be limited and insufficient; will be beyond the reach of health systems that could help them live longer and healthier lives and will scatter around a political environment where the decisions about the quality of those we vote to direct our affairs in a shrinking world is becoming more demanding from the citizenship. In order to produce more we need to know more and we need to choose better every things whether it is a spouse, a friend, a career or a leader in government.
I would like to hear how the three presidential candidates will respond to that Principal’s phone call when it is made. And I also know that the candidates alone will never be able to do everything that has to be done to solve this problem. Unfortunately I have not researched this issue formally but I also suspect that the parents of many of those students are high school dropouts themselves and their kids are victims of a tragic repetitive cultural natural selection process that bodes nothing well for them. They socialize with and marry their same kind and beget the same kind of children. Evolution is the game and mutation of the intellectual kind is the name. I suggest we all start listening to our phones and looking at our children with more care and demand the same from those whose jobs it is to help us do so.
“If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.” Chinese Proverb.
And that is My point of view today.
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