Re: Re: Re: In Defense of HS Teachers


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Posted by Rick Denney on September 04, 2002 at 12:02:52:

In Reply to: Re: Re: In Defense of HS Teachers posted by GC on September 03, 2002 at 22:22:20:

That said, colleges are far more sucessful as a whole than high schools. Why? There are many reasons, but the main one is that they aren't put in the untenable position of treating students like entitled victims.

And they compete, though the competition is secondary to the notion that college education is not a right. There are premium colleges with extremely strict entrance and performance requirements, and community colleges that will work very hard to shepherd marginal students through the programs. There are expensive colleges and those that are not so expensive, and that distribution bears not much relationship in my view with the former scale. Some premium schools are heavily endowed and remarkably inexpensive, if you are good enough to get in. Rice University, for example, was free until just a few decades ago, and it is still no more expensive than the state schools in Texas, which are among the cheapest in the country (if you can just get in). And some schools are expensive but spend that money giving educations to those who can hardly get through the program.

Most colleges give students exactly the education they earn. A degree is a statement of meeting minimum requirements only.

High schools have become an entitlement with the societal demand that every student be given that personal treatment. It wasn't that long ago that troublesome students would be expelled for habitually disruptive behavior, and it was up to the parents to either 1.) send them to a private school that would either tolerate or correct the behavior, or 2.) determine that this person just wants to fix people's cars or weld steel together or something else that can be learned at the hands of a master craftsman without needing a high-school diploma.

Large class sizes and impersonal treatment are beside the point. The best students won't put up with practices that damage their educational experience. I switched from an architecture program to an engineering program (literally changing from one college to another within the same university) precisely because the quality of the instruction in architecture at that school was unacceptable to me. I actually made better grades there than in engineering, but I learned something. With high schools being an entitlement, the best students don't have those choices and don't make that investment. If something is free, then what value does it have?

Rick "saving the rest of the homily for another more general post" Denney


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