The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

I don't know about Waynesboro in particular, but in most US cities, public transport is between abysmal and non-existent. Add this to the fact that most cities are not as densely packed (as say Europe) and a penchant for suburban living, cars are quite important for commuting and to maintain a basic quality of life. It is a decent thumb rule that any working person or someone running errands will almost definitely need a car (eg: the nearest supermarket for grocery shopping might be about 5 miles away). So it is extremely common to see families have a couple of cars because the logistics would be very tough to manage with a single car.

> When we have a desperate need like football bleachers that have to be replaced, or turfgrass that isn’t up to par, we somehow find the money. We — through public or private avenues — meet those needs. Why can’t we find funds to address the areas that seem more pertinent to our primary mission?

> Stop by the high school for a sporting event (and I love sports) and you’ll be impressed with the attendance and enthusiasm. Stop by the high school on a parent-teacher night and you’ll see tumbleweed blowing through the halls.

Living in China, the expat community often criticizes how parents are fixated on trying to make sure their child does well; for most Chinese children, every waking moment of their life from elementary school on is focused on trying to get into a university. Childhood often consists of going to class, coming home to eat, going to class, coming home to do homework, and then sleeping.

The irony in the critique is that most Americans (I float around with a mostly American expat community) are unaware how weird their own sports fetish is. I'm American and I love sports too! But it wasn't until recently (like in the last 10 years) it dawned on me how weird it is that Americans love sports so much.

Look at our university system. The university system is just a proxy for a professional sports league, except the participating athletes are not paid and are not allowed to hold jobs. Instead many of them are required to study things they have no interest in, in the hope that they can get by long enough to be able to graduate to a real professional league to begin making a living wage. Meanwhile many schools go bankrupt trying to field a winning team, while the teams that do win make millions that go to university officials.

When a university is mentioned in the news, it is most likely in the context of some sporting event. Imagine what would happen if, instead of focusing on sports, people focused on the actual mission of the university. I think this is a microcosm of American culture and the way we treat education needs to change dramatically. All of these tests and metrics smack weirdly of "sportsification" or "athelitis", where we try to turn education into some sort of game because it makes it easier to understand even when there is little correlation with the original mission.

I don't know if the situation is as dire as I write it to be. This rant is the result of years of incubation in my mind. Hopefully things will change so I don't seem so grumpy or anti-social (like seriously, it's hard to make friends with other guys unless I can say something intelligent about the Big 10).

There is another way, it's called "talking to them".

I mostly understand your position, but I have one perspective.

> in essence then you are essentially arguing that it is impossible to test an education.

Education can teach techniques, such as multiplication table or spellings, and that part of education is easy to test. However, education also builds the foundation---of learning how to study, or of how to educate yourself, or of how to be intellectually responsible---and that part is hard to test. The effect might be only visible years after you leave the school, after you go through tough problems as a responsible adult.

I'd love the test-based quantitative approach, and I'm sure there are researches, but this required time span to run test-implement cycle seems to make it very difficult issue to tackle.

Depends where you are. Larger northern/coastal cities are often almost European, but elsewhere.. Subjectively speaking, I noticed two main issues:

1) Practical: cities/towns are often extremely spread out/car oriented, often with no footpaths connecting different areas forcing you to walk in the road, and occasionally you'll find that there is no way to travel between two points other than highway/interstates (which does have a hard motorized vehicle dependency).

2) Social: Especially further south, people not travelling by car are often 'viewed with suspicion' (vagrants, murderers, bogeymen).