¼ of high school students drop out and never complete high school. This says an awful lot about school and how it’s not meeting the needs of the students. It’s not shameful for a student to drop out so much as it’s shameful for a school to have a high drop-out rate. There are many reasons a student would drop out – the school isn’t challenging, it isn’t teaching them what they need to know, it’s wasting their time, they’re frustrated (either by school work or by non-school situations), they don’t feel safe in school, or any of a variety of other reasons.
The NCLB is demanding that high schools track drop-outs the same way they track graduates and transfers, and that they meet higher graduation rates so the majority of their students graduate in 4 years (exceptions are made for ESL and disabled students) – without offering any guidelines on how they can do so.
There are possible punitive actions to be taken against schools that don’t graduate a high percentage of their students, though, such as paying to tutor failing students or replacing principals. I don’t think the schools will suffer as much under these rules as the students, and I believe the drop-out rate may increase.
There are ways to improve graduation rates without punishing the schools or the students. It would mean a radical way of looking at schools and at the needs of the students.
Right now, schools have become fixated on churning out students to push them into colleges. The whole goal of the modern high school seems to be to get as many students as possible into a college, whether that’s the right career track for them or not.
When schools were created, the goal was to educate people – to stretch their minds and to give them tools to improve themselves. The earliest public schools concentrated on teaching students to be good citizens and good fighters (the Spartan schools of ancient Greece, for example). The best education was private, and even there, the students frequently learned only what their parents considered essential for the careers chosen for them. The basic skills were reading, writing, music, some basic math, and, for boys, fighting and swimming. Classes were held at the discretion of the teacher and there was no regulation, yet students learned, and often learned well.
Eventually schooling became public, and only those subjects the government felt essential were taught to everybody: basic reading, writing, and math, music, and fighting. The basic reading material was the Laws of the Twelve Tablets, so students would learn the laws very young. Students who would become tax collectors learned more math, students who would become lawyers learned history and law. The wealthy always had the option to teach their children more and better, and many did – philosophy, languages, mythology, religion, history, oratory, rhetoric, logic, and poetry.
Roman fortunes declined when the education of its citizens declined – widespread poverty, illiteracy, higher taxes, and more foreigners employed in government offices. Education became the province of the wealthy – the church and the nobles.
When America was created, education again flourished for all income levels. It was important that we have educated workers who could think and create, so children were given the solid basics: reading, writing, math. Culture, law, history, and literature were included in the reading and writing skills and not taught separately at first.
Until recently, and by “recently”, I mean the last 50 years, teaching students the essentials (which have remained unchanged for millennia) was the primary goal of public schools: reading, writing, basic math. Now, even though teaching the basics is always trotted out as essential, the methods that successfully taught generations of children was abandoned to try to coax children to learn via “feel good” strategies instead of the benefits a good education would provide. Our schools teach “fuzzy” and “soft “ math and “empowerment” grammar, and it’s so far removed from our daily lives it’s no wonder our students drop out in increasingly higher numbers. Education is no longer relevant to life.
So, I propose that we restore those elements of education that succeeded for centuries and redesign how we implement education, what its goals are and how we can provide an education that is meaningful to our children so they can grow into productive adults – the ultimate goal of education is to be productive, to increase one’s net worth and to gain a higher level of wealth and social prestige.
It’s not elitist to pursue knowledge – education is practical, useful, earthy, and common. It is elitist to make the pursuit of knowledge a difficult act. Right now, education, under the guise of “making it accessible” has instead made it so divorced from reality that knowledge itself has become elitist. That’s what we need to change.
I propose that we scrap the educational system we have now (not the people involved in it because we will still need teachers, although we will no doubt lose those who can’t or won’t adapt) and replace it with something that has relevance in today’s society.
First: Pre School: There’s a reason children weren’t given formal education before the age of 5 or 6 – their minds and bodies are often not ready for structured education. This doesn’t mean they aren’t learning. It means their learning is through observation and emulation – they copy what they see the adults around them doing and mimic it as best they can in their play. When all they see their parents do is leave them all day, come home to watch TV and eat, or to shop and eat out – that’s what they learn being an adult is. They extrapolate that parents shop, eat, and watch TV when they mysteriously disappear each day. Children from birth to about 5 or 6 need to be with people who are doing recognizable work – cooking, baking, laundry, lawn care, weeding, carpentry, sewing, painting, reading, writing, debating one another, training animals, teaching, inventing, and so on. They need either cast-off tools and supplies or scaled down tools and supplies so they can mimic the adults in their play. They can’t internalize what they never experience. These pre-school years are important for children to learn their world around them, and they can’t do that if they are kept isolated from the world, hidden from work and daily life, and tucked into sanitized pre-schools where they learn to fill out worksheets and sit still.
Right now, when adults do take their children places with them, they expect the children to sit still and be quiet or they totally ignore them and the children then get into mischief. It doesn’t work that way. The children need to actively be mimicking the adults – sitting at a table talking when the adults talk, making things, doing things. They need toys that look like adult equipment, and they need time to play with those toys. In ancient days, these toys were carved animals, soldiers, mini-weapons, dolls, and smaller pots and pans. Nowadays, those toys can still be carved animals, blocks, dolls, cars, toy phones, toy laptops (or working ones designed for young hands), and other similar things. They have to see adults using the adult versions so they can mimic on their toy versions.
These young children need to explore and sample as much as possible. That is best done by parents in groups or by appointed caregivers who take the children to various places to see and mimic a wide variety of careers and skills. The worst thing for them is to be isolated away from the daily lives of their families.
Around age 5 or 6 or even 7, they are ready to learn in a more formal way, but only half days are needed for this. Most people learn best in the mornings, so Primary School should be conducted in the mornings – the children learn the basics of reading, writing, and math, and they should also learn music and dance (dance taking the place of fighting). Their reading material should be relevant to their future – for us I think learning the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are essential and they aren’t too young to learn them and to learn about our major Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v Board of Education, Argersinger v Hamlin, Griswold v Connecticut, or Stone v Graham. They can enact little plays about the Supreme Court decisions and those games may find themselves to be more palatable to parents than children who play cops and robbers for lack of any other game materials. They can also learn history in their reading and writing along with the sociology of other cultures. Math skills can be served by allowing children to grow gardens to learn geometry and calculus and set up markets to sell their produce to learn accounting and cook the produce to learn fractions and quantities. Applied math is the best math to teach children at this age.
Once they’ve mastered the basic skills, they enter the next level of school. Here, they are exposed to a much wider range of knowledge. Under supervision and with guidance from teachers and mentors, the students explore advanced areas of study, new and related areas, and sample a variety of vocational occupations and degree programs. This could be could be considered an apprenticeship to their future. They delve deeper into sciences, math, art, philosophy, history, politics, law, and craftsmanship occupations such as plumbing, business administration, carpentry, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, architecture, journalism, salesmanship, psychology, sociology, and more.
At the end of this level of schooling, students can be tested to see where their aptitude lies – in combination with their personal preferences, these test scores can help them decide the direction they will be taking their lives. They’ll know if they want to be a biologist or a doctor or a paleontologist, or an auto mechanic, or a CEO, or a bridge engineer. This will help them determine if they will attend a college preparatory school or a vo-tech or apprenticeship program. They can change their minds at any time. A student studying to be an auto mechanic may decide they want to become a bridge engineer instead. If they pass the tests, they can switch career tracks. Maybe someone who was planning on being a neurosurgeon decides they love accounting better. This level of schooling is for them to refine their career choices. Once they graduate from here, they either enter the field for which they apprenticed and start earning a living or they enter advanced training for their chosen career. For some, this will be college, for others, specialized schools.
At any time after they graduate, they can always choose another career field or re-enter advanced schooling. We live such long lives now that it’s possible for us to have 2 or even 3 entirely different career fields, so whatever we choose to be as young adults may morph into something different as mature adults, and yet something else as senior adults.
This is merely an overview, of course, but I think we need to tie education back to real life, to help the students connect what happens in the classroom with their futures and their lives. So many students drop out of high school because they don’t see the relevance of it to them. They don’t want to go to college, they want to get on with their lives. And there’s room in America for people to be secretaries as well as CEOs, for the hair stylists and the neurosurgeons, for the artist and the engineer.
We do a disservice to our children to try to force them all into a college track. The pre-school and primary school years are the only schooling years that should be the same all across the nation. The intermediate schooling should be a combination of class and field work so the students get as broad an exposure to different career fields as possible. At the high school level, they start specializing and may even start their careers early if they show aptitude for it. There is no reason to force them to stay in a classroom situation if they’ve already grown beyond it. Let their job performance reviews be their school grades, with their employer standing as their mentor/teacher until the student reaches their adult majority.
I think such an educational course will do much towards reducing school boredom and drop-out rates and make for happier and wealthier citizens. We’ll still have problems. Poverty, ill health, crime, abusive parents, drugs, disasters, and temptations will always be there, but if the students know they have some control early on (starting in intermediate school), some of these problems will recede and others become meaningless. Instead of telling our children they can grow up to be whatever they want to be, we will be showing them how to grow up to be what they are capable of being. From there, they can teach themselves what they want to be.
Ebonypearl 
Leave a comment