Education Matters

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
- Albert Einstein

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

Education Matters

Is a good education hard to find ... or are we just looking in the wrong places?

Einstein ... Aristotle ... it seems like everyone knows something about education ...

• what it is [or is not]
• how it is acquired [or if it just happens]
• what it should [or should not] do or be used for by those who possess it
• and, perhaps most important of all, whether the answers to all these questions about human education endure across continents and over time or whether they change in response to external temporal factors which make benchmarking a "good education" confusing if not downright impossible.

While we do not expect Einstein or Aristotle to be at the next meeting of the New Symposium Society to discuss education, we do hope YOU will be there ... ready to listen to our panelists ... and to help them probe this perennial and promising topic by asking your own questions.

When and Where

• 7:00 to 8:30 pm Tuesday evening June 27
• Room 103, Business and Technology Building, FRIENDS UNIVERSITY (NE corner of the campus, near the intersection of Maple and Hiram) ... our special thanks to Friends for its continued interest in promoting local civic dialogue!

Opening Questions

Our panelists have agreed to respond in their opening statements to the following questions:

• What are the most important observable outcomes of a K-12 education?
• What are the responsibilities of the state, the home, the business community and the professional educator in ensuring those outcomes?
• How are “we” doing? Any changes needed?

After they respond, the floor will be open to you [and to them] to probe their answers to these questions and to raise other questions about education which the panelists have each agreed to try to answer ... individually and collectively.

Panelists

We are glad to announce our evening's panelists ... and excited to hear what they have to share with us.

Paul Babich had a lengthy and distinguished service as a classroom teacher and department chairman in Wichita Public Schools, retiring in 2009.  Mr. Babich was full-time release president of United Teachers of Wichita, the local teachers’ union, and served on the board of directors of Kansas NEA.  His B.A. (History) and MEd. (Secondary Education) are from  Wichita State University.

Dr. Walt Chappell is the president of Educational Management Consultants and former member of the Kansas State Board of Education. He has been a classroom teacher, data analyst, grant writer, curriculum developer, and evaluator of cost-effective learning systems.  His Ph.D. is from Michigan State University, with emphasis in instructional systems design. Mr. Chappell’s undergraduate degree is from Kansas University (Biology).

Lauren Coleman-Tempel works as a Research Associate for the Kansas City Area Education Research Consortium (KC-AERC) housed at the University of Kansas. She is also a third year doctoral student studying educational inequality through a sociological lens in the Educational Leadership and Policy department at KU. In addition to teaching in the School of Education, Lauren has worked in migrant and low-income education initiatives.

Dr. Delia Shropshire is the principal of Holy Savior Catholic Academy here in Wichita.  She came to Wichita in 1998 after serving in classroom and administrative positions at St. Katharine of Sienna Catholic School in inner-city Baltimore. Her undergraduate degree is from Loyola University Maryland (Business Administration and Management Information Systems); her doctorate, from Capella University (Educational Leadership).

Dan Snyder is a Rhetoric and Logic instructor at the Classical School of Wichita. As a U.S. Marine, he worked in military simulation programming and lectured on design theory.  He was a training technology manager with the Drew biomedical division of the American Red Cross.   In a parallel career, Mr. Snyder performed regularly at the White House as a member of the U.S. Army Chorus, then on stages around the world as an independent soloist.  He has studied at Bryan College, George Mason, Mannes Conservatory, and The New School in New York, where he holds a certificate in screenwriting.

The Evening's Format

Each panelist will give an opening 5 minute position statement ... to which we will provide a link on this page in advance if the panelist wishes to share it with us in advance ... although we have explicitly advised panelists that providing a position statement in advance is not required.

After the opening statements, our moderator will dedicate the remainder of the evening to questions ... from panelists to their fellow panelists ... and from the audience to panelists ... so bring your questions since we will devote most of the evening to looking for possible answers to them.

And for those of you who feel inclined to get some questions out in the open for consideration BEFORE the evening's meeting, feel free to blog your COMMENTS below and to REPLY to any blogged comments as needed to build some trains of thought about our subject.

Epilogue

Another GREAT symposium evening ... with a SUPER panel ... an INFORMED audience ... at an excellent UNIVERSITY [thank you Friends !!!] ... has been completed. We all brought our ideas about education ... and left [hopefully] with a few new ones shared by our panelists and audience of symposiasts willing to come together in civil dialogue.

If you missed it or if you just want to watch it again, here is our AV presentation of the evening courtesy of Paul Soutar at Graphic Lens ... let Paul know how much you appreciate his excellent work for New Symposium Society.

We are already thinking about our next subject ... so if you have some ideas about a topic we need to grasp better ... just let us hear from you ... contact us at newsymposium@gmail.com.   Bye until our next meeting and in the meantime stay tuned to our blogsite.

Suggested Readings

If you have some readings you would like to suggest, just let us know by emailing them to us at NewSymposium@gmail.com and we will try to review them for inclusion.

Shorter

“The State of Education in this Troubled Age”, address by Walter Lippmann, 1940

“Obama Should Heed Tocqueville on Schools”, article by Williamson Evers, 2011

“Financing Higher Education in the United States”, essay by Ben Rogge, 1979

“The Argument for Tuition-Free College”, article by Rep. Keith Ellison, 2016

Longer

“Education and the State”, by E.G. West
“The Beautiful Tree”, by James Tooley

Other Blogs

Liberal Arts AT LAST