Fix High School

Higher education shouldn’t be a “right.” Public education needs to be much better. There’s no reason at all that kids graduating from high school aren’t ready for the world of work. There’s no reason at all that 12 years of school leads NO WHERE and college has to pick up where public education failed. I have a lot of experience with this. I’ve taught college for more than 30 years and in the past ten years, students have come into my classes with less and less preparation and fewer skills.

A few years ago I taught what was essentially 6th grade English to college students who were bitched off (reasonably) that they had to take the class. Students are going into debt to learn what they DIDN’T learn in public schools. The overall opinion of my students in my university classes is that high school was a waste of time. Judging by what they had learned there, I had to agree. I taught the same stuff at the university level I learned in high school and practiced on the job (business communication). By the time I retired in 2014, the material was TOO difficult for a full third of my university students.

It’s a paradox to me that we, essentially an anti-intellectual society, now require college degrees for secretaries (I’ve been a secretary and this comment does not in anyway disparage the job which is difficult, requires a good sense of humor, intelligence, flexibility, attention to detail and the ability to do many things well at the same time — it does NOT require a university degree, or classes in rhetoric, biology and philosophy). My university students graduated from a fairly prestigious business school so they could run Enterprise Rental car agencies. They’re in debt for years so they can do jobs like that.

We need to get away from testing, testing, testing and get back to teaching kids how to do things, starting, I think, in elementary school. “Rigor” is not measured in test scores; it’s measured by mastery. Mastery must be demonstrated; it can’t be quantified. Students need to be captivated when they are most eager and most ready to learn.