[speaker001:] think is wrong with the public school system is that I think we've lately in the last twenty years or so kind of lost focus with the basics uh in order to go into this sort of specialized curriculum where uh we're teaching kids not a broad base of subjects but rather trying to concentrate them on particular subject areas that they think they might be interested in going into a career uh about and the problem comes about if these people aren't well rounded students or graduates that that sort of traps them in the field that they've spent all this time being educated in
[speaker002:] I think there's something to that yeah yeah I tend to agree uh well I remember now it's been quite a few years since my kids were in high school I'm getting that old but uh I remember uh being a little surprised at the uh the catalog of courses like instead of taking a survey course on American Literature you had you chose from uh it almost looked like a college catalog
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] and uh the courses were too specialized as you said and you just read you know they they take a whole semester long course on uh on one writer or something uh that's fine for college but it seems kind of silly for high school
[speaker001:] yeah that's it's I'm only twenty four years old so I've was through a lot of that uh although
[speaker002:] you'd be about the same age as my sons yeah
[speaker001:] well in my luckily up here the school system up here was intelligent enough that they didn't want to get that focused and they drilled into our heads and the same thing with the college that I went to to get as broad of an education as possible so that you're down with the basics and then once you know what you want to do then try and uh get some specific courses but I remember one of the things that they were always drilling into us was the need to learn how to communicate effectively through writing
[speaker002:] um uh-huh
[speaker001:] and I I constantly come up against some of the writings being involved in uh computers and the like where I see other people writing and it's embarrassing you know it's some of these things that and I've seen papers that in sixth grade I wouldn't have had returned uh to me which are getting A's in college today the standards have really fallen
[speaker002:] uh-huh yeah yeah I taught college for awhile not recently but uh yeah I remember I I was quite surprised at uh I mean you start rejecting things on that basis you end up handing uh everybody's papers back that's probably what we should have done
[speaker001:] huh  yeah it it the only way that I ever you know I I took Comp journalism as a major and uh the writing they what they would do is they would focus in on our particular problems well on the college level course and uh
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] uh would then work with us as far as fixing those things I had a problem with uh writing excessive verbiage
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] uh in my writing and I they taught me basically how to pair it down a little bit and I I don't see that in a broader you know even in a public school uh situation because a lot of the teachers have these large classes that they can't devote the individual attention to each student that they may have twenty or thirty years ago
[speaker002:] uh-huh yeah I suppose I guess the class sizes are bigger now I guess they must be
[speaker001:] I remember large group in certain uh courses mainly Political Science we'd have lectures where there'd be three hundred students
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] and if you had a question you know or or didn't understand it at all of course you're not going to raise your hand in a three hundred group
[speaker002:] no
[speaker001:] thing and say I don't know what you're talking about they're going to just keep their mouth shut
[speaker002:] right they need smaller discussion
[speaker001:] and I think you know it's those kinds of things that I I'm not sure how we go about fixing something like that other than maybe devoting some more uh uh resources into first of all getting uh the uh teachers reasonable salaries and uh expecting in return some sort of standard standard and uh you know some proof that what they're doing is actually worth what we want to pay them
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] and then try and get maybe more involvement with the parents a lot of parents expect the schools to just take care of their kids and uh you know you you it's your job not mine
[speaker002:] uh-huh well I've been reading about some successful school systems and it does seem that parental involvement is the is the common uh factor and everybody's doing anything that works these days so that's probably uh one of the big keys
[speaker001:] well how are the schools down in your area these days
[speaker002:] well actually they're pretty good uh I I used to live in Wisconsin I only moved to Texas about four years ago but uh