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> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to
by mmarq 5y ago
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
> Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
The admission criteria of a highschool do not necessarily reward merit. They are more likely to reward having been tutored on how to write highschool admission essays.
- Palmik 5y agoMany European countries have public high schools with admission tests that cover math, general knowledge and language. Some are more competitive than others. In some countries, the differentiation starts even much earlier than that, with 8 year long "gymnasiums". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school)
- mmarq 5y agoIn Germany, when you finish primary school, your teachers give an advice on which school you can attend: Gymnasium, Realschule or Hamptschule, depending on how good they think you are. First of all you don’t have to attend the school your teachers advised, you can still attend a Gymnasium if your teachers said you should go to a Hamptschule. So it’s significantly different from the selection criteria of that American high school. Then this selection process is known to be biased against children of foreigners. Somebody said that without strict competition in high school admissions we wouldn’t have playstations and covid vaccines, so it’s useful to know that the founder and CEO of BioNTech (who is a Turk-German) was advised to go to a Hamptschule by his primary school teachers. So he wouldn’t have been able to attend university. Said that, having a brother that works as a teacher in a Gymnasium, I insist that these kids are not learning anything esoteric or peculiarly complicated. If the average kid in an upper middle class neighbourhood returns an assignment with less than one typo per row, he would be remembered for years.
- panta82 5y ago> In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans. I had to do an admissions test, plus average grade from primary school (50-50 scoring ratio, if I remember correctly). They score everyone, and put them on a list. The top gets in. The rest, good luck, try somewhere else. So it's not random.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]