They are already over burdened.

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 05:09:22 -0400

I have three grandsons in an affluent suburban school. One is AP, one will be AP when he is in high school, and the other is average and struggles. They have more homework than the household can stand.

There was one weekend assignment that took the AP student 12 hours on Saturday and 12 hours on Sunday to complete. That doesn't count his other classes. When does he get a life? When does he get to be ~~a child~~ carefree? Certainly not when he grows up, has a family, and tries to support a household.

My kids were not put on this planet for corporate America to exploit. The meme that education and a college degree in science or math will get you a good job is todays labor market is hooey. The job market is about money. IT goes to India, or H-1B brings Indians here. Jobs are leaving faster than a speeding bullet, and no amount of education is going to stop that. MONEY, union busting, the race to the bottom, and keeping corporate America fat and happy is todays labor market . IF there are no jobs, people will be unemployed regardless of their education or experience.

You do a disservice to our children by buying into this propaganda, and education has always been too trendy and fickle anyway. Stick with the basics.

Here's some facts:

*Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist, predicts that 40 million computer programming bookeeping, graphic deisgn and other jobs will be gone from American soil in the next decade or two. 40 million is more than twice the total number of people now employed in manufacturing. *"More education has been the right answer for the past few decades," said Princeton University economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan S. Blinder, "but I'm not so convinced that it's the right course" for coping with the upheavals of globalization.
*Last year, the average CEO of a company with at least $1 billion in annual revenue made $10,982,000, or 262 times what the average worker made, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released Wednesday.
*Put another way, the average worker - who earned $41,861 in 2005 -- made about $400 less last year than what the average large-company CEO made in one day. That assumes 260 days of pay (52 weeks x 5 days a week).
*The CEO-to-worker pay differential in 2005 was the second highest on record. The highest was 2000, when the average CEO earned 300 times what the average worker made.
*In 2002, the differential fell to 143 as the bear market took its toll on stock-related compensation. Nevertheless, between 2000 and 2005, median CEO pay rose 84 percent to $6.05 million on an inflation-adjusted basis, according to EPI.
*Median worker pay during the same period fell an estimated 0.3 percent to $33,852, based on BLS weekly earnings data.

Leave my kids and my schools alone. All they need is solid basic and critical thinking skills, and they'll be in as good a shape to get employment as any Harvard grad (without family connections) .

I am not advocating against a solid education or a college degree. I am simply saying enough is enough. Leave their childhoods alone. Corporate America will own them soon enough.

dk mich's Open Salon Blog

They are already over burdened.