MYP Learner Profile Word for Today: "Reflective"

A few thoughts from Dr. Mullins’ class last week:

The word “is” is a linking verb, which is transitive, not intransitive. And no web address can possibly have an “@” symbol in it. These funny mistakes were made by an intelligent man who runs a reading institute and whose brother famously made a fortune selling a web browser.

A classmate raised the point that “there will always be someone flipping burgers at McDonald’s.” I would argue that there is no technical reason why we really need people to do most manual, minimum-wage jobs. We live in an age where computer technology is becoming sufficiently advanced that if we really devoted enough brains to the task, we could build machines to accomplish most menial chores, not the least of which includes flipping burgers at McDonald’s. In a sense, minimum wage is really a form of welfare for those whose education does not enable them to find meaningful employment doing anything else. It is not that we really need someone to flip those burgers, the problem is that we have so many people who need that job. Consider this: The more advanced a society, the more specialized and educated its citizenry must be in order to create the efficiencies that enable leisure, art, and luxury. But a society with disparate education will create an intellectual underclass, and these under-educated citizens have to do something. An ideal society, where everyone received the best possible education, would have a much smaller number of people in need of minimum wage labor. They would be doing much more valuable jobs (creating, managing, maintaining, teaching, serving people, etc.) and technology would take up the slack whenever the minimum-wage labor pool becomes so small that (gasp!) wages for simple tasks actually go up. Yes, in a sense, there will always be a lower class, but only because wealth is purely relative. What we consider poor would be wealthy in any other century, not to mention lots of other countries even now! There will always be some who benefit more and some who benefit less, regardless of the system in place. That’s just human nature. But I believe it is theoretically possible to raise the standard of living across the board and lessen the gross disparities that presently are growing. How? By perfecting education for everyone! How else?

Since before Teacher Corps began, two of my favorite ideas for reforming education have been to (1) fund schools at the state and federal (rather than local) level and (2) pay teachers more, so as to attract top talent, and link incentives to performance and hard-to-staff areas. Well guess what? It turns out I wasn’t the first one to think of these things, after all. None other than the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has weighed in on these issues and more, in their report “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” (They also proposed several other dramatic changes, such as restructuring high school so that most students leave at 16 to enter junior college, starting high-quality education as early as age 4 (3 for low-income kids), and communities contracting with outside operators to run their schools.) So it appears that change requires more than just a brilliant idea. Imagine that!