Time for a teaching tuneup
Imagine a crisis in a city's high schools: a staggering dropout rate, an absentee problem, and too few students interested in going on to a community college or state university. Many years ago, the newly elected chairman of the school committee in Compton, Calif., a predominantly African-American community, faced just such a crisis and came up with a radical idea. He told the teachers to add to the standard high school curriculum. What he did was ask each student to apprentice to one of four vocations, just as each was required to participate in an athletic program.
The students were given a choice: work in hospitals, in high-tech firms, in accounting firms, or in restaurants. For example, to create a direct apprenticeship experience in restaurant operations, the schools turned over their cafeterias to the students; for accounting, they turned over their school budget. All the work was supervised by adults, but the results were stunning--a 90 percent increase in school attendance and graduation, and a dramatic upswing in the number of students pursuing higher education.
That was in 1968--but the experiment is relevant today, when the standard U.S. high school curriculum is much as it was before the dramatically successful apprenticeship scheme. In fact, the curriculum goes all the way back to 1892. In his book Making Minds Less Well Educated Than Our Own, Roger Schank describes how it originated in meetings of the National Council on Education, where uniform high school educational programs were created by a Committee of Ten chaired by the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot. The panel concluded that there should be nine core subjects for high schools to prepare graduates to go on to college and scientific schools. Since fewer than 5 percent of students in those days were going on to higher education, the panel also recommended developing a secondary school program for students not going on to college, but it never happened.
The result was that an elitist high school curriculum originally intended to serve the few going on to colleges and universities became the program for the many. Today, more than half our high school students go on to college or university, but the careers they undertake are far more varied than in 1892, raising the question of whether the old curriculum is right for our modern world. Students today are still taught trigonometry and algebra instead of, say, basic medicine; they are taught ancient history and English literature. They are not routinely taught basic business skills or human skills for parenting or marriage. Advanced mathematics and memorization of facts are at the core of our high school education and its test-oriented system.
Facts --and more facts. Is that really appropriate, considering how much has happened since 1892? Must the accumulation of factual knowledge be the principal basis of teaching rather than, say, cultivation of the habit of thinking for oneself? Or, as Benjamin Franklin urged, should children be trained in the practicalities of life? How do we take into account the needs of our Spanish-language immigrant school population? Should we not have alternative high school curricula today that are not just about academics and the preparation for academic careers but also focused on preparing students for a job or vocation in our changed world? Should high school, in other words, prepare people for life as well as college?
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