Some can sail over high school
by Laura Vanderkam,
USA Today, August 2002
Noshua Watson has crammed
much into her 24 years of life: four years in college, four
years in graduate school at Stanford,
close to three years reporting for Fortune.
She recently entertained an offer to teach
college-level economics. Her secret? She
never went to high school. Instead, at age
13, she enrolled as a freshman in
Mary Baldwin College's Program for the
Exceptionally Gifted in Staunton, Va. "I expected more from
myself," Watson says. "Being able to
finish high school early, or not go at all,
opens a lot of doors." Teenage college grads
remain rare - Mary Baldwin graduates a dozen
or so wunderkinder a year - but interest in
early college or college experiences is
growing.
The Indiana Academy for
Science, Mathematics and Humanities, a public residential
school that emphasizes college-level
work, reported its highest number of applicants
ever this year. And the California legislature will vote this
month on a bill that would
allow any gifted student, at any age, to take the
state's high school proficiency exam
and be considered a graduate. Kids who
bypass all or part of high school
ruffle feathers.
"Because high school is such
a big part of American culture, people are
offended when I tell them I
didn't go," Watson says. How, they wonder, could she have
skipped football
games, lockers and homeroom? America is a fragmented society, and high
school is the closest we get to a
common cultural experience. But it's a shame
to rely on nostalgia to hold the country
together. For anyone who's
different, high school can be an act of
mental violence. For them, at best,
it's a waste of time. Gifted students are getting fed
up and leaving
early. As they do, smart parents and teachers alike should
seize the chance to rethink the institution
of high school and whether this common
cultural experience is the best way to
achieve America's educational goals. High
school, as glorified in movies from Grease
to Clueless, is a modern invention. In the
early 20th century, most people didn't earn
degrees; work in factories and farms didn't require
them. Now, high school
is nearly universal, and most graduates go to college. Through
this change, the goal has stayed the
same: producing independent-minded, self-
efficient citizens capable of sustaining a democratic society.
In recent years, however,
the education system has failed to meet that
goal. Companies still hire high
school grads, but a 1996 study by
researchers at
Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that half
of
17-year-olds lack the skills these employers require. As for an
independent-minded citizenry, only half of
eligible Americans vote, and most
don't understand controversial issues well enough to give
consistent opinions to pollsters.
Schools even shortchange the brightest. The
Higher Education Research Institute's 2001
survey of college freshmen found an
all-time high of 41% reported being frequently bored in high school.
While 44% received "A"
averages, fewer students than ever did even an hour's
worth of homework a night. Educators
and politicians are aware of these woes.
Their response has been to lengthen the school day for
more instruction, or lengthen the
school year until summer vacation lasts
little more than a month. But if the goal of
education is nurturing independent minds,
spending more time in the current system is not the
way to do
it. Consider the all-American high school. You're warehoused with
1,000 other students, herded like cows
in the hallways, forced to move like
Pavlov's dog with each bell. After Columbine you're anxious for
your safety; many schools operate on
the prison model in which you can't just
leave. You're surrounded by other teenagers
whose myopic view of the world
creates a teen culture in which the cut of your jeans matters
more than the content of your
character. Preps, jocks, nerds, goths: Boys enforce
conformity with violence; girls shun
and shame. Such conditions might be
tolerated if students truly engaged their minds. But at many
high schools,
even academics reek of the brainless.
My 10th-grade honors English
class, for instance, read
John Knowles' A Separate Peace aloud, each student
reading a paragraph in turn, for seven mind-numbing
weeks. Eventually you
learn that curiosity only makes you miserable. "In 30 contact
hours" - that is, one-on-
ne teaching time - "you can teach a kid to read so
well, the kid will be self-teaching
from that point on," says John Taylor
Gatto, the 1991 New York State
Teacher of the Year, who now advocates home
schooling. More math than most adults use
takes just a bit longer. "So what are we
doing the rest of the 12 years?" he asks.
"We're teaching habits of obedience. We've
extended childhood to an insane degree
because it makes
people more manageable." Lost years can't be reclaimed. "A lot
of research shows that if gifted
people aren't challenged, after a while
they lose interest in challenging
themselves," says Judith Shuey, head of Mary
Baldwin's program.
They stop growing. They stop caring. And it's not
just the bookish types who falter.
Nothing destroys a love of learning like
forcing a kid who wants to fix engines to spend his youth
memorizing the
kings of medieval France. But it doesn't have to be this way, with
secondary school serving mostly as a
way to mark time. Learning is a joy when
it's driven by curiosity, not enforced in a prisonlike environment.
Instead of being confined to a classroom, students interested
in construction or cooking, for instance,
could spend their school days
apprenticed to professionals. Gatto found spots for his kids in
Manhattan's hospitals, charities and
acting schools, fighting the New York
school bureaucracy the whole way. "I never met a kid
who wasn't intensely
interested in something," he says, and he helped kids dabble
until they found that
match.
For those with less practical passions, smaller high
schools would allow students to pursue their own
projects; if a teacher sees 120 kids
a day for 50 minutes apiece, she'll never spend hours
critiquing a student's fiction, or
letting a kid finish her physics experiment
instead of leaping at the bell. Likewise, the
culture of A's for laziness must go.
If the brightest surpass the schools' resources,
there's nothing sacred about the
four-year plan. They can be shuttled to
community college or work or whatever interests them
most. Against an entrenched education
lobby of everyone from administrators to
construction companies,
such change won't be easy. But the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation is already funding the creation of
smaller, personalized high schools,
and the growing number of home-schooling families will inspire
other parents to demand more
individualized education for their children.
Millions of students will start high school
in the next few weeks. Blinded
by movies and back-to-school sales, few will ask whether what
they gain justifies the investment of time.
Noshua Watson asked. "Because high school is
so idealized in the media, I've tried to
learn everything I can
about it," she says. And what did she discover? "I didn't miss
a thing."
Laura Vanderkam is a member
of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
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