To the editor:
As a retired public school librarian and public library director at two Boston-area educational institutions, I would like to respond to Barbara Contardo’s letter in the Sept. 1 edition (“Getting what you pay for”).
While she shared her impressively swift procedure for winnowing down the number of applicants for any job opening at her company, she neglected to back up her conclusion that graduates from state-run schools were so inferior to graduates of private colleges that their applications were automatically thrown onto the reject pile and not even read.
The generalization that all graduates of state colleges were not even worth considering has probably resulted in losing out on some good workers. But it does satisfy the goal of keeping the employees of a company very similar. No surprises.
I imagine that this practice is an example of educational profiling. Certainly I don’t need to remind everyone that the requirement that all children attend school arose from the understanding that in a democratic republic, all voters need to be able to comprehend the issues of the day. We need an electorate that can think. We fund our schools, K-12, as part of this commitment to, and our hope for, our country. But in the complex world of today, we need to educate our citizens beyond grade 12.
I have three advanced degrees, and the best educational experience I enjoyed was at the University of California, Berkeley – a state school. The reason? Money. In those days, the residents of California decided that they wanted the best education they could obtain for all their students, and they were willing to pay for it. Those days are gone. Some taxpayers have lost sight of the understanding that it matters to all of us that all of us are well-educated.
I served nine years on the Dover-Sherborn regional school committee in Massachusetts. It is a public school that provides an educational experience equivalent to private school. It cost a lot of money to keep that school system functioning, but the residents of the town came up with the money, and our real estate valuations reflected the value of an excellent school system.
Many of the Dover-Sherborn graduates attended state colleges in Massachusetts and other states, and did well there. I know that many of them went on to do graduate work at well-respected educational institutions, and have good careers now – although probably not at a company with the selection process delineated by Ms Contardo. They wouldn’t have passed the initial winnowing.
Recent decades have demonstrated that being a graduate of a respected private college is no guarantee that “the best and the brightest” will not perform in ways that are destructive to their own companies, the country, and even the world.
If the goal of America is to have an educated, thinking citizenry, then it needs to support the institutions that can achieve that goal. The politicians who are talking about “free” college education are doing so because the student loans with which so many students are saddled are crippling their ability to live and function in this country. They cannot even consider a private college, and state schools are beyond their ability if they cannot count on receiving a decent salary once they graduate.
How do we pay to get the schools we need? That is the question with which we are all grappling. Maybe “free” college education isn’t the way to go. But what is the way to go? We can’t just abandon our students, and our country.
And actually, Ms. Contardo, there are some free lunches – at least in Damariscotta, in the summer months.
Joan Panek
Damariscotta
