Question of values: Are we learning for earning—or for living?

09-29-2010

Commentary by Jim Haas/Education Week (Subscription required) Jim Haas recently retired as the director of the Master of Arts in Teaching program at Webster University-Kansas City, where he remains an adjunct professor.

Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as one who "knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." Judging by the frequency of items in the popular media equating education with earnings, and the scarcity of media coverage speaking to other purposes of formal learning, we may be well on our way to becoming a nation of cynics. Worse, we may be endangering the effectiveness of representative government and condemning young people to less satisfactory lives than they might otherwise have. Writing in the business pages of the July 27, 2010, New York Times , columnist David Leonhardt described a new study by Raj Chetty and other Harvard economists applauding the value of good kindergarten teachers to their students' lifetime earnings. The economists calculated the earnings of one class in the study having a highly effective teacher to be $320,000 more than a control group of students having less effective teachers. (more…)

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Question of values: Are we learning for earning—or for living?

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