Learning In America

Roger Mudd hosts this incisive investigation into the problematic nature of our troubled educational system. We watched the opening episode, The Education Race, which opened with a comparison of two very different high schools and their students: one in Fremont, CA, the other in Yokohama, Japan. Needless to say, the schools are worlds apart, and not just in the geographical sense. Students in Japan go to school longer, study harder, and generally excel and take pride in their education, while their American counterparts take electives like "Food" and consider school to be pretty much a bummer. Interestingly, when queried about working in factories, all of the Fremont students felt that factory work was beneath them. Ironically, with more and more factories using advanced technological processes, most of the students couldn't qualify for the jobs. The Education Race goers beyond the surface differences, however, and tries to examine the dissimilar social, cultural, and political factors that factor into the equation of education. Noted scholar Jonathan Kozol suggests that if CEO's sent their kids to public, rather than private, schools there would be a major change in the educational system--meaning that unless education has a strong constituency in the economic and political bases of the community, it will be continually underfunded. Other segments in the program show alternative approaches by businesses who need quality workers in order to successfully compete in the international market: at Motorola, employees receive training in basic skills that should have been learned in high school but weren't, while New York Metropolitan Life Insurance has thrown in the towel, so to speak, and ships clerical work out to a company branch in Ireland, where the young people are more eager and capable to do the job. A disturbing and thought-provoking look at our educational woes that should be popular considering the slew of "crisis in education" books that are appear every year. Highly recommended. The other titles in the series are: Upstairs/Downstairs, Teach Your Children, Wanted: A Million Teachers, and Paying the Freight. (See AMAZING GRACE: WITH BILL MOYERS for availability.)