Commentary Upfront Blog
A hands-on view of education
When education becomes one-size-fits-all, it risks overlooking a nation’s diversity of gifts.
Mark Sappenfield
May 21, 2017 —It is curious that Stephen Koziatek feels almost as though he has to justify his efforts to give his students a better future.
Mr. Koziatek is part of something pioneering. He is a teacher at a New Hampshire high school where learning is not something of books and tests and rote memorization, but practical, reports staff writer Stacy Teicher Khadaroo in this week’s cover story. When did it become accepted wisdom that students should be able to name the 13th president of the United States but be utterly bamboozled by a busted bike chain?
As Koziatek knows, there is learning in just about everything. Nothing is necessarily gained by forcing students to learn geometry at a graffitied desk stuck with generations of discarded chewing gum. They can also learn geometry by assembling a bicycle.
But he’s also found a kind of insidious prejudice. Working with your hands is seen as almost a mark of inferiority. Schools in the family of vocational education “have that stereotype ... that it’s for kids who can’t make it academically,” he says.
On one hand, that viewpoint is a logical product of America’s evolution. Manufacturing is not the economic engine that it once was. The job security that the US economy once offered to high school graduates has largely evaporated. More education is the new mantra. We want more for our kids, and rightfully so.
But the headlong push into bachelor’s degrees for all – and the subtle devaluing of anything less – misses an important point: That’s not the only thing the American economy needs. Yes, a bachelor’s degree opens more doors. But even now, 54 percent of the jobs in the country are middle-skill jobs, such as construction and high-skill manufacturing, according to the National Skills Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. But only 44 percent of workers are adequately trained.
In other words, at a time when the working class has turned the country on its political head, frustrated that the opportunity that once defined America is vanishing, one obvious solution is staring us in the face. There is a gap in working-class jobs, but the workers who need those jobs most aren’t equipped to do them. Koziatek’s Manchester School of Technology High School is trying to fill that gap.
We must be alert to what might be called “elitism creep.”
One example is in the advancement of education reforms that largely ignore rural areas, notes Andrew Rotherham of the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners in a U.S. News & World Report article.
“Education reformers too often ... spend a lot of time talking to each other and obsessing about various elite political concerns,” he writes. “Instead, they might think more about what’s happening with voters, how to engage and entice them, and how to build a sustainable politics....”
But another manifestation is in the casual condescension that can surround vocational education.
Koziatek’s school is a wake-up call. When education becomes one-size-fits-all, it risks overlooking a nation’s diversity of gifts.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/upfront-blog/2017/0521/A-hands-on-view-of-education
英语二阅读Text 2 真题源文
Commentary The Monitor’s View The Monitor’s View
Renewable energy at a ‘tipping point’
A shift in thought
Washington may be showing less interest in alternative fuels, but the worldwide picture is dramatically different.
June 26, 2017 —Should the world promote economic growth or fight climate change? That model of “either/or” thinking may be losing its validity faster than even some experts have imagined.
While fossil fuels – coal, oil, gas – still generate roughly 85 percent of the world’s energy supply, it’s clearer than ever that the future belongs to renewable sources such as wind and solar.首页 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 尾页
The move to renewables is picking up momentum around the world: They now account for more than half of new power sources going on line.
Some growth stems from a commitment by governments and farsighted businesses to fund cleaner energy sources. But increasingly the story is about the plummeting prices of renewables, especially wind and solar. The cost of solar panels has dropped by 80 percent and the cost of wind turbines by close to one-third in the past eight years, reports the International Renewable Energy Agency.
In many parts of the world renewable energy is already a principal energy source. In Scotland, for example, wind turbines provide enough electricity to power 95 percent of homes.
While the rest of the world takes the lead, notably China and Europe, the United States is also seeing a remarkable shift. In March, for the first time, wind and solar power accounted for more than 10 percent of the power generated in the US, reported the US Energy Information Administration.
President Trump has underlined fossil fuels – especially coal – as the path to economic growth. In a recent speech in Iowa, a state he won easily in 2016, he dismissed wind power as an unreliable energy source.
But that message did not play well with many in the Hawkeye State, where wind turbines dot the fields and provide 36 percent of the state’s electricity generation – and where tech giants such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google are being attracted by the availability of clean energy to power their data centers.
Prominent Republican politicians in Iowa are backing the growing industry. The state’s senior senator, Republican Chuck Grassley, has pledged his strong commitment to wind power, as has the new GOP governor, Kim Reynolds. Other red states in the heartland, such as Kansas, the Dakotas, and Texas, are experiencing a wind-powered boom as well.
The question “what happens when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine?” has provided a quick put-down for skeptics. But a boost in the storage capacity of batteries, and a dramatic drop in their cost, is making their ability to keep power flowing around the clock more likely.
The advance is driven in part by vehicle manufacturers, who are placing big bets on battery-powered electric vehicles. Although electric cars are still a rarity on roads in 2017, this massive investment could change the picture rapidly in coming years. China, whose cities are choked by air pollution, may lead the way.
“Renewables have reached a tipping point globally,” sums up Simon Virley, who studies the world’s energy markets for the international accounting firm KPMG. He sees renewables competing on price with fossil fuels in more and more places around the world.
“I think [the shift to renewable energy is] happening much faster than most well-educated business people in America understand,” adds British investor Jeremy Grantham, cofounder of the Boston-based asset manager firm GMO, in Britain’s Financial Times recently.
While there’s a long way to go, the trend lines for renewables are spiking. The the pace of change in energy sources appears to be speeding up – perhaps just in time to have a meaningful effect in slowing climate change.
What Washington does – or doesn’t do – to promote alternative energy may mean less and less at a time of a global shift in thought.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2017/0626/Renewable-energy-at-a-tipping-point
英语二阅读Text 3 真题源文
Digital media
Opinion
The Guardian view on digital giants: they farm us for the data
Editorial
We are neither the customers nor even the product of companies like Google, but we turn our lives into the knowledge that they sell
An astonishing project is under way to build a “digital time machine” that will show us in fine detail the lives of ordinary Venetians across a thousand years of history. It is made possible by the persistence of the republic’s bureaucracy, which, when Napoleon extinguished the Republic of Venice in 1797, left behind 80km of shelving full of records of births, deaths, trades, building, land ownership, private letters, ambassadors’ reports and even medical information. All this is now to be digitised, cross-referenced, and analysed, and all its secrets laid bare to provide a picture in unprecedented richness and detail of the lives of individuals and the development of society over many centuries. Obviously, this is wonderful for historians and indeed anybody with an imagination alive today. One wonders, though, what the Venetians would have made of it, had they known their lives and letters would be so carefully anatomised after their deaths.首页 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 尾页
Far more is known about us now, though, and in real time. The data in the Venetian archives was unmatched in medieval and even early modern Europe, but it is only legend and scraps of hearsay compared to the knowledge of us accumulated by the giants of the digital economy – Google, Facebook, and Amazon – who all in various ways use the data harvested from their users to make billions of dollars, from advertising or from direct selling, or from some combination of both. Their knowledge of our intimate lives doesn’t wait two centuries or more until we’re dead. They get it live, in real time. Sometimes they know our minds before we know them ourselves. It’s a situation quite unprecedented in history.
The European commission may be about to levy the biggest fine in its history on Google for anti-competitive behaviour – potentially more than
