How Do We Change High School?
Getting a high school degree use to be an achievement. Now it is just the bare minimum of the educational requirements. How do we make high school a better place to prepare people to enter the workforce? First off, we have to admit that not everybody has to go to college or can even succeed at it.
A long time ago when I was a student in Australia, they had a system where if you were going to go into a trade you left school at 10thgrade. If you wanted a greater education base, you went to 11thgrade. You only went to 12thgrade if you intended to go to college. This system work well if you have very high standards and someone with a 10th grade level of education has strong reading, writing and math skills. If schools only focused on having students strong in those three areas, we would have a better-educated society. In Australia, they had a strong trade history where someone would be mentored and trained by a master in that particular area.
I do not recommend that we have people leave school at 10thgrade. We just adjust the education track so that their trade is part of the school. If we grounded them in reading, writing and math for ten years, then the final two years they could concentrate on a trade. I mean really ground them. We would need rigorous measurement of attainment of certain levels. We set the bar high and not low so that everyone can pass. Once this base is set, then they could spend most of the day learning the trade. They would still need to have continual assignments in reading and writing so that those skills sets are maintained and improved.
The need for trades people (e.g. heating and air conditioning, car mechanics, etc.) is not going away. Let us have high school prepare those students who are going to go into those areas. We need them as much as college graduates.
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