I don't see how high school does anything for learning responsibility. You go to school, do work, get grade. Same thing we did in middle school and in elementary school.
Except more bullshit and people giving you way too much homework.
The real purpose of high school is keeping the roving hordes of teenagers off the street. Teenagers have no judgement (I certainly didn't), and we would like to have some method of keeping them occupied. Unfortunately, where before that method involved actual learning, nowadays schools are basically just low security prisons.
Furthermore, Newt is completely off when he claims that all adolescents want more responsibility. This is simply untrue. A small fraction of adolescents want more responsibility, the rest want to hang out with their friends all day and do nothing. Which is actually pretty close to high school.
I think some of this might be that high school tends to be quite easy for the brightest students. I did close to none of my homework all the way through high school because I didn't have to (paying attention in class was sufficient for me to graduate with mostly A's and get into the university of my choice).
You're basically suggesting that high school is to easy. I felt like hs was to easy too at the time. looking back I could've taken more AP's, but honestly, why would I have spent more time learning about things less useful to me when I had the option of learning about more useful things.
What I did was I just started bringing textbooks from any subject I was interested to all my classes and read them. If you are getting good grades no one will care. But really, unless your teacher is really awful they won't care anyway, because there are so many kids who do need help that they should be focusing on. Who gives a shit about the kid who probably could've passed the exam without taking the class when so many kids don't understand basic algebra, especially with no child left behind.
hs sucks, try to learn social skills by observing others and practice thinking about being in other peoples shoes to learn better empathy. Try to learn useful things like econ 101, programming, business stuff, math, etc.
Adolescence really just eats balls and there isn't much you can do about it.
High school's only benefit is a pseudo-forced social climate and not needing to compete for classes like you're buying concert tickets (the number of classes I was waitlisted for despite signing up the day of...).
Everything else is much worse for how I think. I don't get to choose how to time my schedule, the curriculum is mostly fixed (you would always have math/english/history, some language for 3/4 years. You only choose an elective and maybe 1 year of science) and homework tended to stack up constantly because every class was 1 hour M-F. And yea, as you mentioned it's absurd having 1 day due homework spring up when you may or may not be preparing for some other project, or test, or even competition.
You also were much more pressured against taking time to yourself. You can skip a class or take a sick day in "the real world" if you need a break or emergencies come up. those "perfect attendence" rewards were the worst grift of the education system.
We gave high school kids some time for self-directed activities, like go see teachers for help, make up work, get a snack, hang out with friends if you have your work done.
We had kids standing around looking confused. They didn't know what to do. They asked for directions on what to do. We said to look at their grades and decide what to do. When they finally pulled up the gradebook on their laptops, they would point at it and say "what do you want me to do?"
Something. We want you to decide, on your own, to do something. Anything. Just make a choice.
Most kids did figure it out, though not always making the wise choices (but that's part of the reason we're giving them the freedome). But there was a minority who couldn't grasp the idea that they were personally able and responsible to decide what to do.
High school is where students should be getting their breadth. At some point you have to learn what you will do, and balance that out with a realization that more and more school just equals more and more debt.
I would actually like to see the opposite...get rid of all elective coursework and try to graduate students in two years. They'll have an incomplete education, but we all have incomplete educations.
If anything, we as a society and as individuals are creating more harm by pointlessly overeducating ourselves.
The older I get, the more I realise "high school" wasn't really the problem at all. High school, like any other government institution, is ultimately a reflection of the values of the people who run them. And in some places - those values aren't necessarily the best.
High School is a time waster. It's designed to waste as much time as possible so that parents don't have to pay for child care. At the same time it's putting kids into extreme stress situations. Sitting in a classroom for hour long stretches, overcrowding, bullying, authoritarian discipline and arbitrary rules. 5 hours of lectures per day, 5 days a week with a vaguely humiliating hour of physical education which involves stripping in front of other people.
I think the main problem with high school is that it wastes an absolute shitload of time. About 8 hours of your day shot actually in school, most of which is extremely low value or idle, and then (in my case, at what I think was a pretty middle-of-the-road school) 60+ minutes of homework on top of that every single day, which you're to do after you're already mentally beat from the intense boredom and "pay attention at all times or get in trouble" atmosphere of the rest of the day, with no option to defer it until you don't feel quite as much like your brain is running out through your ears.
As a staunch advocate of teaching the humanities and someone who thinks the "what k-12 education needs is math education that looks more like what the 0.1% of people who are math nerds wish they'd been taught" folks are dead wrong, I still think high schools ought to re-consider having every class be the same length, and maybe cut some of their social studies and history entirely (because it's almost never well-taught enough to be worthwhile) so the homework portion of mid- and high-level math classes can be brought into the school day proper. It'd be a much better use of time, and I think having a teacher available for questions and guidance during "homework" time would do wonders for math comprehension and test scores.
Though how schools would justify giving their coaches full teacher salaries without as many history and social studies classes for them to teach, is an open question.
I don't know. But I don't believe blame is a good impetus. I spent a lot of my high school experience stressed and blaming myself for my inability to work inhuman and inhumane hours. Only in retrospect have I realized that I was not at fault. Only now have I understood that working so hard with so little sleep on tasks I find so uninteresting is not admirable in the slightest.
This will only get worse. It's becoming harder and harder for students to get accepted to colleges, which in turn means the bar for them is rising, often to ridiculous levels. The students who make it to the high levels are not the smart, charismatic future leaders of tomorrow. They are neurotic, depressed, sleep deprived and scared. They are pushing themselves to ridiculous, unhealthy limits for whatever reasons. And by selecting them and placing them in the same school, the same room, we are only concentrating these qualities.
I don't know what we should use to push students forward. But I know that teenagers these days could use less blame.
Just to provide a counterpoint, my experience was that there was far more stupid bullshit in high school than in college, much of which we were told would prepare us for college. By this I mean petty, overly complicated processes and nitpicky rules. There was also more stupid bullshit in college than in the workforce that we were told, again, would prepare us for the workforce.
> Well, they also ought to teach time management, emotion management, energy management, people management.
I would argue that's about the only thing that schools do teach.
After around 5th grade, almost none of the facts you teach a kid stay with them into adulthood.
What middle school and high school does is force you to learn how to get your work done on time, be social, have hobbies, work with "bosses", and interact regularly with people you don't like. That's the real value in high school IMO.
99.9% of the people who took calculus in highschool would fail an exam 10 years later. The brain just doesn't hold onto info it doesn't use. I think it would be the same if there was an explicit class on e.g. time management. Nothing you say to the kids will have any impact. OTOH, giving them homework and deadlines let's them actually figure out and practice these skills in a safer environment.
In my opinion, the problem with high school is due to the large amount of wasted time. So many classes had dozens of days if not the large majority of the time spent on nothing or busy work. Busy work is a large part of bureaucratic organizations where most of the cogs will end up, but it shouldn't be the goal.
I think many high school courses could be pushed down into earlier education and a great deal of knowledge a university provides could be offered there.
its not really the student's fault. Its the parents/society's. There is this idea, that if you don't go to college after highschool that you are some sort of loser.
When in reality you can self-teach yourself everything they teach you in college. Take programming for example, is it worth going into debt up to your eyeballs, if you could have learned everything on your own?
Except more bullshit and people giving you way too much homework.
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