Tuesday, April 01, 2008
High School Drop-Out Rate
The graduation numbers reported here are a disgrace. These teens are dropping out of school because the schools don't teach them anything of value. What schools need to teach our teens are life and work skills. None of the teens who dropped out of school were ever going to college. Ever! When will we get it through our heads that most students are not college-bound, and that our high schools need to teach those not bound for college just like they try to teach those bound for college? We need to fire everyone in and associated with education and just start all over. The first rule would b e: anyone with a degree in education is banned from teaching. They have proven over and over that they're not prepared to do the job. How about we make some trade high schools and fill them with retired tradesmen, engineers, etc.? Then we could make some college-bound high schools and fill them with teachers with Master's and Doctorates in the fields they teach in. Then we would have teachers who actually know the subjects they teach, and students would be going to schools teaching things they need to know.
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2 comments:
Hey, now. I have a degree in education. There are teachers here and there who are managing to do an OK job despite what they learned during their ed. degree. And there are more teachers who might get behind a good thing if they could see it actually working and if it were backed by a sober, clear, and hard hitting exposition of solid research.
Not that I don't agree with the diagnosis. I think the first people to go should probably be the tenured constructivist Ed. D.'s. They're the ones who are most resistant to education with values and evolutionary explanations of human learning and behaviour.
It's also a problem that the educational workplace rewards seniority and bureaucratic savvy over creativity and productivity, much like the old socialist state did. This way of thinking causes those in power to prize their own comfort above all else, and to see bold new ideas as disruptive and threatening.
I wonder if it would be possible to form some kind of "parallel polis" (a term I first read in an article by Czech thinker Vaclav Benda), a demonstrably better system creating demonstrably better educated students that would operate something like the Samizdat and the "flying universities" under Eastern European communism. Maybe that's an overly dramatic comparison, as our own enclaves of socialism-lite tend to ruin fewer lives and persecute dissent less ruthlessly than the real thing did, but I still think there's something to it...
I do sometime tend to paint with a broad brush -- but I primarily do so because the exception does not negate the rule. Could you have learned as much with a minor in education and a major in general studies?
If you look to what is happening in California, you can see the state's reaction to a parallel polis. The state is on the attack against home schooling, even though (perhaps precisely because) home schooled children ado better academically. Still, I think such things need to be done -- and done more often.
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