Why I should be depressed about schools

Ken Robinson makes a lot of good points about schools, some of which I've thought of before, and many of which have the potential to be depressing, and he's not alone.

Alfie Kohn writes about homework and the way we work kids into the ground during their tenures in public schools in The Homework Myth and many of his other books on education.

Rosalind Wiseman writes in Queen Bees and Wannabes about the social hierarchy of high school, especially in girls' cliques, and the undercover hostility that guides many if not most of their interactions.

Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner write about the rough transition from college to the "real world" that graduates experience in Quarterlife Crisis. Robbins, at least, is Yale-educated and has published several books: Skull and Bones, on the Yalie secret society; Pledged, on the sorority subculture especially prevalent in the south; and The Overachievers, on the drive of high schoolers (in this case, in Bethesda, Maryland, but it's a pretty universal story) to be high-scoring and "well-rounded" enough to make it into the colleges of their dreams.

I read Pledged and Overachievers last fall, and they impressed me. (Robbins is a good investigative journalist who can tell a story well.) Robbins pointed out that getting into the schools of their choice is harder for high schoolers now than it was even ten years ago (when I was graduating -- and when late-20something Robbins graduated), and that high schoolers had less of a chance to actually be "well-rounded" because they're so busy being neurotic and "productive."

You'd think given all this over-achieving that we'd be the richest generation ever. But we're not -- in some ways we're the poorest. Thanks to the addition of a bachelor's degree to the list of qualifications that make us employable, we're the first generation of Americans to need to pay for the education that will eventually help us earn our money. We've got loans. Tamara Draut points out in Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-somethings just can't get ahead that we have far more debt than our parents, who just can't understand why we don't move out of the house and get a job, already. The answer is that we can't afford to.

And the cost of college isn't going down -- to my knowledge, it never has. Last I heard, the rate of inflation for college tuition prices was 79% above the rate of general inflation. When you're talking $25K, that's a lot of money. Anecdotal evidence: When I graduated high school at the end of the last century, Harvard would run you 34K/year. Now their Web site tells you to count on 53K per year. M.I.T. is even worse (58K).

That's pretty depressing.

And if the education we're getting isn't doing what it needs to do -- if, instead of making us adaptable and creative individuals who can apply ourselves to the unique un-forecastable problems of the future, it's making us more likely to buckle under and become cubicle-dwellers -- then what are we even paying for? Better to keep ourselves in voluntary poverty than socially sanctioned slavery.

But what if education doesn't have to be depressing?

What if there's a better way?

I wanted to write that question all in caps, I mean it so much -- because I think there is a better way, or rather, that there are better ways.

More on that later.