Opining about that New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce report, John McWhorter isn't afraid to re-evaluate the way today's youth live out their late teens through early twenties.
If only more parents caught on to way his of thinking: "I see nothing disturbing in an alternate universe where most students of what we now think of as freshman age are, instead, out in the world learning to ply a trade, be it in an office, workshop, or conservatory. Instead, they spend six years after 10th-grade gamely tolerating several dozen courses, most with only the vaguest relationship to the jobs they will seek — or who they will be as people."
The part about the "certain idealization of public schooling in the days of yore" also struck a chord. Time and time again, I've noticed how tricky it is to convince folks of a certain age, who don't like home ed., that the American school of today is nothing like the American school of sixty years ago.
