The hometown of writer Michael Sokolove is the kind of job-starved, blue-collar town where it’s near-impossible to argue that a good job isn’t the end goal of education. In Levittown, PA, “the schools are counted on to round out children — to educate them in the basics, push gifted students higher, pull up the lagging ones, and to give everyone a degree of culture and a vision of what exists beyond the horizon.”
But here, as in so many cities and towns across the country, there are students who need to be pushed yet higher. Students like Kevin McCann, a senior at Truman High, who told Sokolove, “I think education is about finding out what you want to do in this world.”
And then, discussing his just-lost dream of attending Vanderbilt, “he said he felt that he was not admitted because Truman’s course offerings were not rigorous enough.”
More students than not miss out on their top-choice of college. But when a student does everything he or she can do – as band-member and top student Kevin did – it’s a tragedy when a school can’t offer the courses that meet the standards of top colleges and universities.
And perhaps a greater tragedy that only expensive courses labeled AP and IB (too often advanced in name only) signal the depth of content and the level of rigor required by these colleges.
The New York Times calls Levittown’s tough financial decisions “The Math of Heartbreak.”
[...] Yes, Kevin McCann, education is about “finding out what you want to do in the world.” It’s also about learning to pursue those desires with thoughtfulness and integrity. As Nussbaum also writes, “Knowledge is not a guarantee of good … behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior. In a world full of simple stereotypes, we will only preserve democratic values of debate and mutual respect if we try hard to understand the past and the present.” [...]