7 ms·

Except that's what high school should be. And let's face it, general studies courses that make up that "expansive view" of college really are repeats of high sc

Except that's what high school should be. And let's face it, general studies courses that make up that "expansive view" of college really are repeats of high school with slightly more work, at least if you take honors classes in high school. And if that expansive knowledge is being surrounded by peers who are in pursuit of higher learning...that's not the typical college experience these days. High school is becoming more dumbed down so that people can pass state exams and graduate rather than teaching the knowledge that we used to consider foundational. We've lowered expectations and extended adolescence so much that we no longer expect 18 year olds to be mature and capable adults, which shouldn't be the case. Your view of trade schools is severely skewed though, and is really indicative of the problem discussed in the article. Most trade schools do not turn you into a worker on a production line, they teach you to be a skilled worker or artisan in a trade. You don't go to a trade school to be an assembly line worker, those are jobs that are taught on the job and are typically low paying. You go to a trade school to be an electrician, mechanic, carpenter, welder, etc. These are skilled jobs that are difficult and challenging. They are also jobs that have a greatly accelerated pay scale, and often lead to jobs that pay as high or higher than the large majority of college degrees (maybe STEM excluded), particularly if you are able to start your own business in the trade.

zanny 8y ago
I'd argue that expansive view should be coming way, way earlier than high school. How about before you beat the curiosity and sense of wonder out of 5-8 year olds with times tables, memorizing the dates presidents were born, and repeating the word "prepositional phrase" a thousand times - that would be a good time to start.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  Public education is fundamentally broken in this regard (except for the times tables, IMO much more time should be spent on math in-school vs homework). History in the elementary school level seems near useless, aside from building reading comprehension skills.
  - zanny 8y ago
    I'd much rather see kids doing things in class that benefit from the use of multiplication, along with exposure to how to do it and arguments for using it, than to just lecture them on repeatedly writing 2x2=4 2x3=6 2x4=8 over and over for weeks. I'm pretty sure in my own first grade experience that was the point where half the class started drifting towards the "I hate math" camp of now-adults.
    - jdmichal 8y ago
      Isn't this roughly the idea behind Montessori method? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education Also, math education in general has a huge problem around teaching solutions without teaching the problem. (Hence the pervasive question of what will I ever need this for...) I will always know what a limit does, because my precalculus teacher taught it by finding the area under a curve using rectangles. We started with large rectangles, were shown the error. Cut the rectangles in half, hey error goes down. Make them really really small, error goes down even more! What happens if we make them zero? Oops, equation explodes because zero-width rectangles also have zero area... The function is discontinuous at zero. So let's learn limits to work around discontinuous points of a function!
- dustindiamond 8y ago
  Should parents have no responsibility in this regard? It isn’t the elementary school’s child.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    They should but assuming it will "just work" is foolish. If society wants universal capability instead of depending on parent ability and inclination (rather scattershot) the answer is yes they do have a responsibility.
  - sbov 8y ago
    Sure. But on a school day my kid spends around 7 hours at school. And only 3 awake hours with me. And in those 3 hours we also have to fit in breakfast, dinner, chores, and getting them ready for school. So maybe 1 hour of actual time where we can do something. There are also weekends of course. But ultimately kids spend about as much time in school as they do with a (working) parent.
  - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    1. Kids also learn through play and downtime and simply going with the adult to do things. 2. Too much schooling is detrimental to learning. 3. Most parents aren't trained in teaching. If we expect a parent to teach a child formal stuff, perhaps we should train the parents on how to do these things.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    Should we expect anything from parents, really? An absurd percentage of people can't properly learn the simple task of driving even after taking classes and passing a state exam. How do you imagine these people to perform in the task of raising a human being, from an objective perspective? The answer is they suck. Terribly.
  - zanny 8y ago
    There is no accountability for a failure to raise a child well, so no, parents have no responsibility. It is of course a conversation one could have on if parents should be held responsible. Schools are the only force in childhood held even remotely accountable for the success of those children entering adulthood. Which is kind of where the desolation of inner city schools come from - the schools are punished for bad parenting, but have no real capacity (especially once punished via funding cuts) to do anything about it.
- asark 8y ago
  My kindergartener's at one of the best public elementary schools in our city. Great middle and high school in her future, too, assuming their quality holds out. Brand new building, too, first year in use. They give them (the kindergarteners) twenty minutes of recess. Indoor recess, if the weather's bad, is often (part of) a movie. This is all day kindergarten, mind you, none of that half-day stuff. Since school's largely in the Winter when the sun's up late and down early, and they're getting outside only about 20min a day, best guess is these kids are gonna have a lot of "ADHD" misdiagnoses and they're all gonna be badly nearsighted due to insufficient exposure to sunlight. The low-recess crap is incredibly unhealthy, in ways that will permanently harm many of these kids. Plus, you know, the whole obesity epidemic thing. The school food's terrible, too. I think they've just done the same thing a lot of parents do and gone for whatever hyper-palatable crap they know the kids will eat (hungry or not) to reduce complaints (from parents—"my Sally just won't eat vegetables! She's going to starve!"). [EDIT] point being yes, schools' priorities—even the "good" ones—are totally messed up starting the very first year they have the kids.
sodafountan 8y ago
The person you replied to also doesn't mention that just because you attend a trade school doesn't mean you can't acquire an expansive world view on your own, again more stigma that is indicated in the article. Why wouldn't a linesman, electrician or carpenter be able to self educate? We live in the day and age of the internet, the largest store of human knowledge ever to exist is a few clicks and an inquisitive mind away. I understand that college exposes you to things you might not have otherwise been exposed to, and provides teachers and mentors to facilitate the learning of that material. But if you attend college with the end goal of getting a degree to cash in for a paycheck like so many college age people do and you're not motivated to actually learn the material you're exposed to in any meaningful way and that information isn't retained then what's the point? Certainly that's not all college kids but I'd argue the vast majority are only there because they believe it to be a ticket to the middle class. I'm a self-taught software engineer who never finished college, so the trade school stigma hits home. I certainly strive to be as educated and productive as possible in my life and career - and so far that path hasn't held me back at all. I'm employed, highly paid and fairly happy, I just chose not to receive that education in the confines of the classroom
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  College provides TIME with no or minimal responsibilities beyond your learning. That time for self improvement is the valuable resource that doesn't really exist for most people outside of college. Not because college is wonderful, but more because you cant get unsecured loans to sit at home and read. (Also, pet peeve: these conversations often compare highly motivated and indepenhdent people who take the no college route to slackers who attend college. I never see anyone pointing out the fact that highly motivated and independent people who do opt for college often do much better than they could've without the degree. Often in tippy top status/comp finance, medicine, and tech poaitions. College doesn't make sense for everyone, but IMO it paradoxically makes the most sense for people who don't need it to enter technical fields like SWE. Because those are the ones who will end up on fast tracks after graduating that would be difficult to get on without the degree)
  - finder83 8y ago
snide 8y ago
This was exactly my problem with College and why I didn't succeed there. I came from a really good high school that offered a breadth of knowledge across fields. When I went to college (granted in 1998) to become a "web designer" the curriculum and training was just not there. My first year was taking variations of the same math courses, the same english courses and a couple comp sci courses (teaching Java). It was heartbreaking. Anything design related involved drawing classes. I dropped out mostly because I was too disheartened by what college was and didn't end up going to class. I was instead hacking in my dorm room on HTML, CSS and Photoshop. When I dropped out it led to immense guilt in relation to my family, who very lovingly had done everything they could to set me up to succeed. It was only a year later when I had a surprisingly decent pay check to show my parents that they didn't consider me unmotivated. College isn't for everyone. It's especially not good if you know what you want to do and have mastered some manner of self-learning. For those of us that figure that stuff early, it's much better to just jump into the work and figure it out. In those ways I somewhat value a good high school as more important to college. It was there that I learned to learn and could explore my interests in a well-rounded curriculum. I'm conflicted about how I'll deal with the scenario when my own kids grow up. I married a teacher, and speaking for myself I do very much value liberal arts educations. I just think a lot of those introductions need to be provided in High School, with secondary education focused more towards whatever your career is. If you don't know what that career is yet, I think potentially waiting a couple years to go to secondary education (be it college or trade school) till you know is a better bet. My big takeaway is there isn't some magic formula for this. Everyone is different and we shouldn't pressure certain paths.
- jinfiesto 8y ago
  Counterpoint, being exposed to other people's ideas within your discipline of choice is important. You learn a lot faster when you're plugged into a network of brains that are all generally oriented in the same direction. College isn't the only place to find a good network of brains to plug into for your field, but it is convenient, and the barrier to entry (rapidly less so) is relatively low.
  - stale2002 8y ago
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> general studies courses that make up that "expansive view" of college really are repeats of high school with slightly more work My humanities courses in college were bona fide mind-expanding. The problem is many colleges run their programs more like trade schools, with zero emphasis on balance between the arts and sciences.
- finder83 8y ago
  I wish mine were more so. It probably does depend a lot on the school.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    I took Junior and senior level history classes to satisfy my social science elective requirements. I found them very interesting and enlightening. I tutored a few people who took the sophomore level "world history" classes that most kids took to satisfy the requirements. Those sounded like little more than brutal rote memorization exercises.
slavik81 8y ago
For example, the journeyman was historically required to travel and broaden their skills to advance to master. Even today, breadth of experience remains an expectation for journeymen.
Broken_Hippo 8y ago
* We've lowered expectations and extended adolescence so much that we no longer expect 18 year olds to be mature and capable adults, which shouldn't be the case.* I'm not even sure this is the case. We (Americans) don't allow an 18 year old to have any sort of alcohol without potentially ruining their adult lives. We didn't let folks vote until 21, but there was an issue with drafts and things. My mother remembers being excited that she was going to vote at 18 instead of 21 - my mother is almost 60. It wasn't that long ago that we didn't allow women to get loans without a spouse, brother, or father signing for it. Women were never really proper adults. American parents can still be pretty decisive on a college student's ability to go to college simply by refusing to release tax returns to the student. I'm not even sure folks can go to school without them. They certainly won't get loans. A young person's life is just barely their own at 18, and they don't have full rights of adulthood.
- pesmhey 8y ago
  Neotony has been an absolutely integral aspect of homo sapiens’ evolution. We’re fine.
taurath 8y ago
College has the time to add a lot more nuance. People graduate high school with relatively basic understanding of communication, history and economics - and those basic understandings aren’t enough to expose you to the nuances of the world. I’ve always felt like high school gives you just enough to have a very simple worldview, and college starts you on a path to realize that everything is more complicated than you thought.
- finder83 8y ago
  It probably depends a lot on your high school and teachers. I had a unique high school experience in that I went to public school for two years and private school for two. The private school did a much better job of teaching those nuances, and challenged me 10x more than public school ever did. That probably says as much about the public school as the private school though, which just helps to support my point that we could be doing better.
  - taurath 8y ago
    I went to a way different private school where most of the sciences were a conspiracy against god and the church. Not all are equal (and most of the “school choice” debate is around govt money to pay for the science is the devil schools)
snowwrestler 8y ago
You can’t learn in high school what you can learn in college for two simple reasons: 1) there’s not enough time to learn it all, and 2) even if there was, the human brain does not work the same at 14 years old that it does at 18 years old. And you don’t get an expansive view of human knowledge in “general studies courses,” you get it by taking a broad array of specialized courses. Again: takes time. Trade schools are great for learning a trade but there is a lot more to life than a trade. There’s more to a society than who has a higher salary.

zanny 8y ago

I'd argue that expansive view should be coming way, way earlier than high school. How about before you beat the curiosity and sense of wonder out of 5-8 year olds with times tables, memorizing the dates presidents were born, and repeating the word "prepositional phrase" a thousand times - that would be a good time to start.

linuxftw 8y ago
Public education is fundamentally broken in this regard (except for the times tables, IMO much more time should be spent on math in-school vs homework). History in the elementary school level seems near useless, aside from building reading comprehension skills.
- zanny 8y ago
  I'd much rather see kids doing things in class that benefit from the use of multiplication, along with exposure to how to do it and arguments for using it, than to just lecture them on repeatedly writing 2x2=4 2x3=6 2x4=8 over and over for weeks. I'm pretty sure in my own first grade experience that was the point where half the class started drifting towards the "I hate math" camp of now-adults.
  - jdmichal 8y ago
    Isn't this roughly the idea behind Montessori method? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education Also, math education in general has a huge problem around teaching solutions without teaching the problem. (Hence the pervasive question of what will I ever need this for...) I will always know what a limit does, because my precalculus teacher taught it by finding the area under a curve using rectangles. We started with large rectangles, were shown the error. Cut the rectangles in half, hey error goes down. Make them really really small, error goes down even more! What happens if we make them zero? Oops, equation explodes because zero-width rectangles also have zero area... The function is discontinuous at zero. So let's learn limits to work around discontinuous points of a function!
dustindiamond 8y ago
Should parents have no responsibility in this regard? It isn’t the elementary school’s child.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  They should but assuming it will "just work" is foolish. If society wants universal capability instead of depending on parent ability and inclination (rather scattershot) the answer is yes they do have a responsibility.
- sbov 8y ago
  Sure. But on a school day my kid spends around 7 hours at school. And only 3 awake hours with me. And in those 3 hours we also have to fit in breakfast, dinner, chores, and getting them ready for school. So maybe 1 hour of actual time where we can do something. There are also weekends of course. But ultimately kids spend about as much time in school as they do with a (working) parent.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  1. Kids also learn through play and downtime and simply going with the adult to do things. 2. Too much schooling is detrimental to learning. 3. Most parents aren't trained in teaching. If we expect a parent to teach a child formal stuff, perhaps we should train the parents on how to do these things.
- airstrike 8y ago
  Should we expect anything from parents, really? An absurd percentage of people can't properly learn the simple task of driving even after taking classes and passing a state exam. How do you imagine these people to perform in the task of raising a human being, from an objective perspective? The answer is they suck. Terribly.
- zanny 8y ago
  There is no accountability for a failure to raise a child well, so no, parents have no responsibility. It is of course a conversation one could have on if parents should be held responsible. Schools are the only force in childhood held even remotely accountable for the success of those children entering adulthood. Which is kind of where the desolation of inner city schools come from - the schools are punished for bad parenting, but have no real capacity (especially once punished via funding cuts) to do anything about it.
asark 8y ago
My kindergartener's at one of the best public elementary schools in our city. Great middle and high school in her future, too, assuming their quality holds out. Brand new building, too, first year in use. They give them (the kindergarteners) twenty minutes of recess. Indoor recess, if the weather's bad, is often (part of) a movie. This is all day kindergarten, mind you, none of that half-day stuff. Since school's largely in the Winter when the sun's up late and down early, and they're getting outside only about 20min a day, best guess is these kids are gonna have a lot of "ADHD" misdiagnoses and they're all gonna be badly nearsighted due to insufficient exposure to sunlight. The low-recess crap is incredibly unhealthy, in ways that will permanently harm many of these kids. Plus, you know, the whole obesity epidemic thing. The school food's terrible, too. I think they've just done the same thing a lot of parents do and gone for whatever hyper-palatable crap they know the kids will eat (hungry or not) to reduce complaints (from parents—"my Sally just won't eat vegetables! She's going to starve!"). [EDIT] point being yes, schools' priorities—even the "good" ones—are totally messed up starting the very first year they have the kids.

sodafountan 8y ago

The person you replied to also doesn't mention that just because you attend a trade school doesn't mean you can't acquire an expansive world view on your own, again more stigma that is indicated in the article. Why wouldn't a linesman, electrician or carpenter be able to self educate? We live in the day and age of the internet, the largest store of human knowledge ever to exist is a few clicks and an inquisitive mind away. I understand that college exposes you to things you might not have otherwise been exposed to, and provides teachers and mentors to facilitate the learning of that material. But if you attend college with the end goal of getting a degree to cash in for a paycheck like so many college age people do and you're not motivated to actually learn the material you're exposed to in any meaningful way and that information isn't retained then what's the point? Certainly that's not all college kids but I'd argue the vast majority are only there because they believe it to be a ticket to the middle class. I'm a self-taught software engineer who never finished college, so the trade school stigma hits home. I certainly strive to be as educated and productive as possible in my life and career - and so far that path hasn't held me back at all. I'm employed, highly paid and fairly happy, I just chose not to receive that education in the confines of the classroom

throwawayjava 8y ago
College provides TIME with no or minimal responsibilities beyond your learning. That time for self improvement is the valuable resource that doesn't really exist for most people outside of college. Not because college is wonderful, but more because you cant get unsecured loans to sit at home and read. (Also, pet peeve: these conversations often compare highly motivated and indepenhdent people who take the no college route to slackers who attend college. I never see anyone pointing out the fact that highly motivated and independent people who do opt for college often do much better than they could've without the degree. Often in tippy top status/comp finance, medicine, and tech poaitions. College doesn't make sense for everyone, but IMO it paradoxically makes the most sense for people who don't need it to enter technical fields like SWE. Because those are the ones who will end up on fast tracks after graduating that would be difficult to get on without the degree)
- finder83 8y ago

snide 8y ago

This was exactly my problem with College and why I didn't succeed there. I came from a really good high school that offered a breadth of knowledge across fields. When I went to college (granted in 1998) to become a "web designer" the curriculum and training was just not there. My first year was taking variations of the same math courses, the same english courses and a couple comp sci courses (teaching Java). It was heartbreaking. Anything design related involved drawing classes. I dropped out mostly because I was too disheartened by what college was and didn't end up going to class. I was instead hacking in my dorm room on HTML, CSS and Photoshop. When I dropped out it led to immense guilt in relation to my family, who very lovingly had done everything they could to set me up to succeed. It was only a year later when I had a surprisingly decent pay check to show my parents that they didn't consider me unmotivated. College isn't for everyone. It's especially not good if you know what you want to do and have mastered some manner of self-learning. For those of us that figure that stuff early, it's much better to just jump into the work and figure it out. In those ways I somewhat value a good high school as more important to college. It was there that I learned to learn and could explore my interests in a well-rounded curriculum. I'm conflicted about how I'll deal with the scenario when my own kids grow up. I married a teacher, and speaking for myself I do very much value liberal arts educations. I just think a lot of those introductions need to be provided in High School, with secondary education focused more towards whatever your career is. If you don't know what that career is yet, I think potentially waiting a couple years to go to secondary education (be it college or trade school) till you know is a better bet. My big takeaway is there isn't some magic formula for this. Everyone is different and we shouldn't pressure certain paths.

jinfiesto 8y ago
Counterpoint, being exposed to other people's ideas within your discipline of choice is important. You learn a lot faster when you're plugged into a network of brains that are all generally oriented in the same direction. College isn't the only place to find a good network of brains to plug into for your field, but it is convenient, and the barrier to entry (rapidly less so) is relatively low.
- stale2002 8y ago

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> general studies courses that make up that "expansive view" of college really are repeats of high school with slightly more work My humanities courses in college were bona fide mind-expanding. The problem is many colleges run their programs more like trade schools, with zero emphasis on balance between the arts and sciences.

finder83 8y ago
I wish mine were more so. It probably does depend a lot on the school.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  I took Junior and senior level history classes to satisfy my social science elective requirements. I found them very interesting and enlightening. I tutored a few people who took the sophomore level "world history" classes that most kids took to satisfy the requirements. Those sounded like little more than brutal rote memorization exercises.

slavik81 8y ago

For example, the journeyman was historically required to travel and broaden their skills to advance to master. Even today, breadth of experience remains an expectation for journeymen.

Broken_Hippo 8y ago

* We've lowered expectations and extended adolescence so much that we no longer expect 18 year olds to be mature and capable adults, which shouldn't be the case.* I'm not even sure this is the case. We (Americans) don't allow an 18 year old to have any sort of alcohol without potentially ruining their adult lives. We didn't let folks vote until 21, but there was an issue with drafts and things. My mother remembers being excited that she was going to vote at 18 instead of 21 - my mother is almost 60. It wasn't that long ago that we didn't allow women to get loans without a spouse, brother, or father signing for it. Women were never really proper adults. American parents can still be pretty decisive on a college student's ability to go to college simply by refusing to release tax returns to the student. I'm not even sure folks can go to school without them. They certainly won't get loans. A young person's life is just barely their own at 18, and they don't have full rights of adulthood.

pesmhey 8y ago
Neotony has been an absolutely integral aspect of homo sapiens’ evolution. We’re fine.

taurath 8y ago

College has the time to add a lot more nuance. People graduate high school with relatively basic understanding of communication, history and economics - and those basic understandings aren’t enough to expose you to the nuances of the world. I’ve always felt like high school gives you just enough to have a very simple worldview, and college starts you on a path to realize that everything is more complicated than you thought.

finder83 8y ago
It probably depends a lot on your high school and teachers. I had a unique high school experience in that I went to public school for two years and private school for two. The private school did a much better job of teaching those nuances, and challenged me 10x more than public school ever did. That probably says as much about the public school as the private school though, which just helps to support my point that we could be doing better.
- taurath 8y ago
  I went to a way different private school where most of the sciences were a conspiracy against god and the church. Not all are equal (and most of the “school choice” debate is around govt money to pay for the science is the devil schools)

snowwrestler 8y ago

You can’t learn in high school what you can learn in college for two simple reasons: 1) there’s not enough time to learn it all, and 2) even if there was, the human brain does not work the same at 14 years old that it does at 18 years old. And you don’t get an expansive view of human knowledge in “general studies courses,” you get it by taking a broad array of specialized courses. Again: takes time. Trade schools are great for learning a trade but there is a lot more to life than a trade. There’s more to a society than who has a higher salary.