High school should prepare young adults for `real life', correct? Our high school system fails miserably at that. Students spend more time learning calculus than they do learning English, history, and just basic life skills.
This is my first real diary; please bear with me!
I'm a junior in high school. I go to the Bergen County Academies, a public magnet high school in New Jersey. BCA is a prestigious high school. BCA students have won what seems like every award on the planet. Students from around the county apply to the school and less than 25% are accepted into one of the seven Academies. Each Academy focuses on a different area- there is science, business, engineering, and so forth. We love technology- the school has more computers than students. What is unique, though, is the freedom allocated to students. We have free time (during which we can sit at our lockers in the hallways), block scheduling, and an elongated school day.
We have a problem in high schools. When I was a freshman, I was sitting in my business class, and the teacher asked the class (about 20 students) who the two Senators from NJ were. To put it simply, I was the only person in the class who knew. This is at a school filled with the brightest teens in the state! It's scary.
The average BCA student spends about 2.6 hours a week learning history, English, and foreign language. We spend 4 hours a week on science and math. My dad is an accountant, and every time I learn something new in math, I ask him how often he uses it in his profession. There hasn't been a single time in the past two years that he has said he ever uses them. Compare that to history and English- they're used countless times a day, and we spend less time on them. I don't get it.
Millions of students graduate each year knowing calculus. That's all well and good, but they don't know how to balance a checkbook, or go out on a professional lunch, or do any of the numerous other things necessary to succeed.
I often ask my teachers why this is. The most common answer? "The colleges want it." I'll let you figure the absurdity of that statement out on your own.
The problem is made even worse by the restrictive core curriculum standards put into place by the state and federal government. Now districts can't decide on their own to improve their schooling; they need to deal with even more bureaucracy! We spend time learning how to take standardized tests. Hey- students don't know who the Vice President is- but they know how to fill in bubbles!
So what to do? First of all, we need to decide what is important to learn, and what is fluff. But everyone's answer is different- there are some students who will be interested in science and math, and others who want to devote their lives to studying art. The solution, then, is to allow students to pick their own high school careers. While a basic level of knowledge in a wide variety fields is important, the vast majority of classes taken in high school should be chosen by the student. In a sense, it would be like starting college early. But even if the student later changes his interests or career path, he or she would still have spent time learning things that would be useful.
And it beats learning calculus.
Thoughts?