How Can High Schools Better Prepare Students?

What an interesting question! Many of my relatives are high school teachers, and we discuss education a lot, but I don't think this specific topic has come up.

Here's my answer: I was one of those "brainiac" kids that skated through high school without much effort. I always got good grades, and I was well prepared for college. What I did *NOT* learn was interpersonal skills. (Think Mr. Spock.)

I didn't know that such skills could actually be taught in a classroom format, but recently I took a class at my church, and it was eye-opening! I'm not suddenly a diplomat or anything, but I learned a lot. The past few decades would have been much MUCH easier if my high school education had included listening skills, assertiveness training, and a bit of psychology.

It was interesting to me that about a decade ago Emotional Intelligence began to be more and more discussed as just as important, as IQ.

Back in the day when I was in High School in Chicago of '69 and '70, I suppose I was fortunate to be dragged to weekend Sensitivity Training by my Episcopal Priest Uncle withwhom I was shunted for straightening out by Mom when I threatened to drop out of High School in NC.

I am therefore inclined to agree with you AstroNut, that such classes and experiences have value, and it is surprising what one can learn in the classroom experience.

It sure is tough to learn some of these skills on the job.

In management positions I have to admit that early in my career there were a couple of times when learning was painful enough to have brought me to tears parked in the driveway of my home.

"What doesn't destroy you, makes you stronger." when applied to this sort of learning is true.

After reading all the replies, I come to a general conclusion; "everyone wants to make it easy for the kids to learn". I don't think it's the right approach to education. Those who graduated high school 50 or more years ago did so because of HARD work. No one made it easy or tried to. The harder you have to work to achieve a goal, the more it will be appreciated in the future. Quit coddling kids and kick their butts. Hard work makes for good citizens. When they go for a job, they won't find it easy in the real world. You won't be coddled at work. You will be expected to produce.

Hi Ron, I have to take issue with your statement:

After reading all the replies, I come to a general conclusion; "everyone wants to make it easy for the kids to learn"...

I do believe that everyone wants to make an environment that is more conducive to learning, I don't believe that many of us in this thread believe that education should be 'easy'. I think that the system has been so severely slanted to make 'passing' easy that 'learning' has ceased to be a consideration; while this may be a 'Pedantic Word Nazi' view I think the point has to be made that passing a class/test is not proof of knowledge gained, and education is supposed to be about gaining knowledge.

Aside from my disputes with your verbage I completely agree with your overall opinion:

...The harder you have to work to achieve a goal, the more it will be appreciated in the future. Quit coddling kids and kick their butts. Hard work makes for good citizens. When they go for a job, they won't find it easy in the real world. You won't be coddled at work. You will be expected to produce.

Of course, even in the professional world standards are coming down... weakest link and all.

Ronesto,

I would like to differ from your statement that today's learning stuff for the high school kids need to be made easier as per many posts and your view on making it harder and more basic. Just take the list of basic subjects and the course content on a comparative basis to your times and the present times- you will find a lot of new subjects and heavy syllabi's being offered for the current day kids. It is partially due to the specialization and rapid technological developments happened and happening that the present generations are being made to be familiar with. The modern technological aids help to do things much faster instead of tedious lengthy procedures. I agree upon your point of learning fundamentals without modern aids.

A right education should focus a balanced display of past, present and futuristic aspects- more into fundamentals and strong basics, drafted in a simplified and conceivable manner even to the average student. Teachers are to be motivated to care for the average and below average students and pay a whole sum care.

Maybe we need to spend more time in school in order to absorb the additional information thrown at us. Maybe a 13th or 14th grade is needed to prepare the student for the real world. In some areas, high school students attend classes year round (except for major holidays). It has been advocated here in this country, but I don't know if it has ever been implemented. I think the teachers union is opposed to it. When did unions get into the act of education?

I graduated from high school in 1972. There were no computers and you still had to use slide rules. Corporal punishment was still in vogue in the schools, going to a school of over 2000 high school students there were very few disciplinary problems in the class rooms for fear of the paddle, one could actually think and listen to the instructor. We had excellent teachers in my school, but we lived in wealthy neighborhood and what our school couldn't provide the parents did. We had a very proactive PTA. As far as how I would shape high school today, number one I would bring corporal punishment back into the schools, the schools are out of control. One of the reasons teachers don't want to teach in the public schools, they can't control the kids in the class rooms and it's dangerous. Number two I would want to allow different learning paths tailored to that students ambitions or proclivities. Number three I would have a fast track for those ambitious students who wanted to get through school and on too college or a career. If we do these three things I think there would be a lower drop out rate in high school. I know this is an over simplified analogy, but those are a few of my observations from a layman's perspective.

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Good idea. No, GREAT idea- parents participating in their children's education. Not just one day a year at a PTA meeting, but actually teaching a class. Parents could learn a lot they have already forgotten...

I agree. Along with a course in financial instruments such as loans, mortgages, interest, venture capital, contracts, etc., there should also be a course in basic law. Also, it wouldn't hurt to have some intro courses in such things as plumbing and electricity--not necessarily for vocational purposes, but rather to create informed consumers who can then understand how, when, and why to deal with qualified tradespeople and professionals in these areas.

If we institute these course, what get removed from the curriculum?

I realize that there are tradeoffs. There should be good classes in history. literature, geography, science, computer fluency, basic law, basic economics, art and music appreciation, and others. If well presented, all of these can be interesting, just as I have found them to be interesting.

'Study Hall" if it still exists...waste of valuable time!

One course of 'Social Studies/Civics'...you should have learned all you'll ever need after taking World History, US History (or country of origin) and State/Local History...Most immigrants taking the US citizenship test know more about US history and civics than probably 80% of the natural born citizens..(Doesn't say much for our courses of study does it?)

'Health'....a ridiculous course designed for those who have decided that studying any real science is not-for-them...who has Ever flunked out of a 'Health' class?

That's three. I'm sure there are easily more.

My first thought is "how about 5 years of English classes..." Aside from knowledge gleaned from reading assignments (most of which I would have read anyway) there was not a single thing I learned in an English class after about 3rd or 4th grade... probably because the curriculum is wholly dedicated to making the lowest common denominator feel like a genius...

Nothing will 'fix' our education system short of providing for the individual needs of every student, no fixed curriculum can serve even half of the student population effectively because we all experience and learn different things at different rates. So I guess my real answer to your question is "whatever the student doesn't still need to learn'

So do we toss out standard public education and just have home school or hired tutors for all?

Oh, Heaven forfend!! I know some parents -- well, let's just say that home schooling would be cruel & unusual punishment for their kids. On the other hand, I know several home-school families that are doing a splendid job. I think we NEED public education, at the very least to serve as a safety net. It behooves us as a society to make that net as strong as we can, but nothing can take the place of parental involvement.

or perhaps we give teaching our children the prioroty it deserves, stop paying CEO's of financial firms billions of dollars to commit condoned larceny and use the savings to hire enough teachers at sufficient a pay rate to persuade intelligent competent caring people to take on the burden of preparing the next generation to compete with the world...

If you don't think that education is the single most important tool we have to secure our future, you need one... an eduation that is. Would you use a broken down mal-adjusted torque wrench to assemble a suspension bridge? and then drive on it? that's what we are doing with our education now, and we are using this tool to build our support system for our dotage... personally I'm terrified.

I will say, at least where I live, that teachers are intelligent, hard working, and committed. I don't want it thought that most educators are dullards who can't find employment in other fields. Again, at least where I am.

It just seems that the system falls apart because of numbers. Students have such individualized needs that it becomes very difficult to meet the number of needs for the number of students.

If it was just the curriculum, that would be only one problem, but students come with social, psychological, and physical needs/shortcomings and we can no longer assume that these needs are being addressed in the home.

This goes directly to the point I'm eluding to... you have good teachers, but not enough, other districts have enough teachers but they aren't very good, and some lucky communities have just the right mix of quantity and quality (they are the extreme minority)

Education is treated like a business in this country, not surprising since that is what capitalism is all about, the bottom line (in dollars/diploma)... simple economics dictates that if you have resources sufficient to do half of the job you can either do half of it right, or you can do all of it 'half-donkey'd' (sure, there are 'shades of grey', but you get the point)... right now I'd say the averages in our education system are leaning a little more toward the less desirable half of the mule... pardon my pun'iness. If we all got together and exercised some intelligence, the money is there in spades to do it right, but it gets dumped in the proverbial pork-barrel so we can be the world's police force and pad politicians 'retirement funds'.

Definitely there are changes that need to be made at the home front too, but you and I can't really do much about that without trampling the rights of idiots to raise their children, I loath the thought of bright young minds being prematurely tarnished by idiot parents, but I can not in any way question their right to raise their children as they feel they should (as our education system and their idiot parents taught them they should). We can directly impact the public school system however; this is where we should focus on throwing a major coup, not with some nonsense like requiring high school students to take a test to prove they learned what they should have learned by the end of elementary school before we let them graduate high school.

IMHO High School should be about one of two things depending on the student: Trade Skills or College Prep., and college prep should be focused on getting those core-curriculum class credits done so you don't have to take them in college (pretty much any 100 series classes (e.g. English 101: Grammar and Composition, foreign language, algebra, calculus etc...) If you aren't ready for these classes you should, by rights, still be in jr. high/middle school, and I don't give two hoots if it is shameful and embarrassing to get left behind, if you are still in Jr. High at 16 you can drop out and flip burgers or you can buckle down and learn something, an excellent opportunity for the young student to learn the hard reality of life. We continue to cater to the lowest common denominator which, not surprisingly, keeps getting lower; and we continue to shun causing discomfiture to our students who, also not surprisingly, are getting more and more 'thin-skinned' and less capable of dealing with actual hardship (when life without a cell-phone is considered a significant hardship there are definitely some priority issues).

I have to disagree with your statement that education is treated like a business. Treatment like a black hole might be closer to the truth. Most schools are run by either unions or local government. Neither of these entities know much about running an efficient business. A few schools actually are run like a business and some of these do quite well. Right now teacher's unions are much more interested in keeping the status quo than in changing or improving and they are not student friendly no matter what words they spread about. Unions have no interst at all in getting rid of bad teachers, after all they pay dues. Today most/maybe all unions support teaching what to think rather than how to think. Our government is also on the what to think boat instead of how to think. What do you think standardized testing is all about? This is going to continue to lead to a crisis in education in the USA. Thank goodness for the exceptions out there.

An American Federation of Teachers member - not by choice.

/rant over/

I have to agree with most of your statement, though the word-nazi pedantic s.o.b in my head screams for some alteration...

unions are frequently run on very sound business models... after all this is very sound business practice: "Unions have no interst at all in getting rid of bad teachers, after all they pay dues." [sic] The problem is that they have one primary goal: Keep bringing in the dues.

Municipal bodies are not as likely to run on a sound business model, but that's just because the former business school students running the show aren't as good as their wall street counterparts, and those pesky voters interfer with anything that makes actual sense.

One issue you miss, hairless- the ratio of bureaucrats to educators in most school districts...Spend more money on educators and less on the peripherals, and you might actually accomplish something...

true, in a very many districts anyway... definitely a variable that should be factored in