Interesting Article

We Waste Our Chil­dren’s Time

Does High School Do More Harm Than Good?

Racism, vio­lence, sex­u­al harass­ment, drugs—everything you encounter in the out­side world is in high school. Despite changes in our soci­ety and our chil­dren, high school has exist­ed for more than 400 years with rel­a­tive­ly few changes.

Oprah talks today with teens, par­ents and edu­ca­tors about whether High School itself is the problem.

Dr. Leon Botstein
A Con­tro­ver­sial Plan

Dr. Leon Bot­stein, Pres­i­dent of Bard Col­lege and author of Jef­fer­son­’s Chil­dren: Edu­ca­tion and the Promise of Amer­i­can Cul­ture, says we should just get rid of high school after the 10th grade and start a new sys­tem that grad­u­ates stu­dents when they are 16 years old.

Oth­er com­ments from Dr. Botstein:

• High school is just an arti­fi­cial world that’s sports-dom­i­nat­ed, clique-dri­ven and noth­ing more than wast­ed time for our children. 
• Since high school is seg­re­gat­ed by age we are cre­at­ing a world in which sta­tus is the most impor­tant thing. 
• Mediocre peo­ple write tests. Tests don’t have any­thing to do with the edu­ca­tion of a child — so there’s no con­nec­tion with learn­ing. Since mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy exists, Dr. Bot­stein sug­gests we could have tests that empha­size learn­ing, not cor­rect­ness: a young per­son gets an answer wrong and under­stands why, and if they guessed it right, they’d also under­stand why.