Botstein calls for cutting two years off high school so we can rescue its
victims (most students), presumably by sending them to college's like his
(Bard, a small liberal arts school near New York) or just letting them
loose to sink or swim in the unforgiving US economy.
Leon was a college classmate of mine at the U of Chicago; he really wanted
to be an orchestra conductor, but wound up through connections in New York
as an assistant to someone high in the educational-political complex. He
was, and presumably still is, very bright and very verbally impressive
(talks even faster than I do!) and when someone was desperate for a bright
idea to save a financially failing liberal arts college (Bard), he was
tapped to be its new President ... at 23 and without a PhD or previous
academic job. Naturally this made a big splash in the press, especially the
New York Times (of course he knew the columnists there), and this was
parlayed, with some fund-raising, and a good knock-off of the Chicago
liberal arts core curriculum, into new enrollment and salvation for the
college. That was back in the 70s. From time to time Leon is still relied
on by the education press as a thoughtful and quotable source. He is one of
the longstanding defenders of the sort of education he and I both enjoyed
at Chicago, one with a real intellectual bent of the sort most people don't
much seem inclined to.
At the U of Chicago of our day there was still a tradition of admitting
bright high school students before graduation, even a year or two before,
on the grounds that they would be stifled in a high school but would
blossom at U of C. Some did, some didn't.
This idea echoes through Leon's call for ... not really abolishing high
school, but cutting it down to size. Liberating the inmates so they can go
to Bard ... which is not cheap of course, though Leon has raised a lot of
money for scholarships for poor and minority students to attend. And places
like Bard, but cheaper ... perhaps including my own public university,
where you might get a UC style intellectual education from a few teachers,
but it's hit and miss.
The interviewer situates Leon's plan in relation to even more radical
proposals to just do away with high schools as places that are
fundamentally unhealthy for growing humans. Columbine and the social
pressure cooker of high school peer culture are noted. A curriculum that is
mainly oriented to test performance and marketable skills, or to the
deadhand of academic traditions about what is supposed to be important
(like Shakespeare and factoring polynomials). Teaching that does not take
time to make very much genuinely intellectually exciting, or to promote
radically critical perspectives (which many adolescents in our society
would kill for ... and sometimes do kill for).
How bad are high schools? Having spent a fair bit of time in fairly
typical, even above average ones in New York, and occasional visits to
others around the US and in other countries, I can say that their classes
are mostly pretty boring, for me, and for the students so far as I can tell
or they are willing to tell me. Who knows what percentage of teachers or
classes encourage intellectually stimulating or critical perspectives? no
one has ever done the kind of research necessary to even estimate. My view
is that "good teaching" means that the subject matter is competently
presented, there is some humor, there is some discussion on a fairly basic
level -- no real challenging of basic assumptions, and now and then there
is some peer-group discussion or a longterm individual or group project
that might have something to do with an area of genuine interest on the
part of a student. That is about as good as it gets, and that happens I
would say in at most one-third of the teachers' classes in the best urban
schools. In a more typical class, there would be a few glitches in the
subject matter presentation (lack of clear understanding by the teacher),
only perfunctory known-answer questions substituting for discussion,
peer-group work in which the students either do meaningless tasks or are
totally confused about what they should be doing, less humor, no longterm
development beyond the standard textbook or curriculum units, and no
individualization.
Such a school culture might be a great acclimator to the workplace culture
of the 1950s or 1970s, both for working class students and for middle class
students. Boring, authoritarian, isolating. Do we really know how many
workplaces have changed over to the idealized new model in which there are
changing teams work on changing projects with considerable latitude and
expectation of problem-solving initiative so long as there are results, all
in an organization undergoing continuous self-evaluation and rapid change
desperately trying to stay afloat in a volatile and changing global
economy? i.e. a workplace environment for which high schools are a really
bad preparation, not just intellectually and in terms of useful skills, but
also in terms of general culture and socialization? perhaps they are still
a good preparation for office politics and a desire to join the army.
I am not arguing here for school-to-work (though a little bit of that
philosophy could clear out some old cobwebs), just identifying the
contradictions between the consensus view of the function of high school
... prepare for college or work ... and what it would really take to do
that. For that matter, colleges do not seem to be adapting very much to
preparing students for the supposed new workplace either ... we are either
still preparing them for the oldstyle workplace, or for entry into some
intellectual nirvana such as we ourselves inhabit. [insert irony]
If there were a plausible alternative to high schools, I'd be for it. There
may soon be. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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