Schooling: Repeat After Me

First, the time-tested small university seminar is an ideal learning environment. It should be replicated as closely as possible at the high-school level. (There is much dubious research suggesting that class size is not a major issue. I suspect that such papers are written by the mavens of educational theory, not by beleaguered high-school teachers faced daily with a thick pile of teenage humanity, some asleep, others wired.) In general, adolescents need to be corralled, and corralling twenty-five can be achieved by most adults with imagination; corralling a group of forty requires a drill sergeant.

Second, a high-school teacher should not have students who have already read and understood The Catcher in the Rye and are eager to move on to Dostoevsky sitting beside students who are busily pulling the thorns out of their paws. (The good work of guidance departments should not be overlooked.)

Third, for the obvious reasons that they do not handle choice well and that democracy requires a certain knowledge base, society has decided that teenagers should not vote until they are eighteen. (That they can drive at sixteen may be considered a sop to the automobile industry.) Why then do we accord them so much choice at high school? What is wrong with a core curriculum of English, history, geography, math, science, art, and physical education—for all students, at every level of ability, to be repeated every year and taught at appropriate but increasing levels of sophistication and with new material?

I can hear the anti-elitist arguments: What about shop, keyboarding, family studies, careers, computer programming, business, off-campus credits? All such activities are no doubt worthy in their own right, and should be pursued . . . at community clubs, libraries, after school, wherever, but not during the six hours a day teenagers are actually required to be in school. Furthermore, self-esteem, that lacuna of the teenage years, is achieved through a sense of accomplishment, and there is simply no comparing the feeling of satisfaction gained from reading with the sensation of robotically following most forms of visual stimuli. In brief, private schools are offering smaller classes and a straightforward liberal arts and sciences curriculum, and unless the public-sector schools offer the same, the middle- and upper-class exodus to private schooling will continue unabated. The job of high-school education is to produce learned, curious, knowledgeable folks, not those in need of remedial help in basic skills at the university or college level.

Whatever else happens during the torrid years of high school, no student with designs on post-secondary education should emerge without having read a slew of curricular and extracurricular books. They can range from Gordon Korman to Margaret Atwood. It doesn’t much matter, but 100 titles under their belts, and the ability to sit still for a couple of hours creating meaning from static black-and-white type, should be a bare minimum.

As part of the exit criteria from high school, all students should be paraded down to the cafeteria, given five or six sheets of blank paper and two hours, and told: “Okay, one of the entrance requirements to university and college is a ten-paragraph essay on the colour red. Take your time.” For regular readers, such an assignment might even be pleasurable. Either way, it represents a good test of accumulated skill and a clear indicator to colleges and universities of student ability. University students stampeding off to remedial English classes isn’t the end of civilization, but, to paraphrase Robin Williams, “You can see it from there.”