Should we go to school longer?

Great Debates
1

I’m seriously starting to think that, in this day and age, it would be beneficial to extend mandatory schooling to the age of 20. In hindsight, I believe had I had the extra 2 years of schooling, I probably would have went to college afterwords. I know a lot of the classmates I had that went felt like they were pushed a little too quickly into graduating with a degree they were unsure of (unsure it was truly what they wanted a degree in) or did poorly in college and ended up not finishing.

And from all of my friends who have teaching degrees and no steady teaching job, I would assume that there would be a market open.

Just the tip of the IceBerg,
-MeatBeast

2

Why not extend it 6 more years?

3

How are you going to make legal adults go to school if they don’t want to?

4

you could’t but you could raise the dropout age to 18.

5

I’m confused – are you seriously arguing that there should be two more years of mandatory schooling at the high school level, before students are allowed to enroll in college? Why would you want to keep students in high school at an age when most of them are capable of handling college-level work? What good would that do?

If you’re making the argument that high schools aren’t doing a very good job of preparing students for college, I agree, but I doubt that two more years of the same would do any good. Quality, not quantity, is the problem.

I think the other part of the problem is that most middle-class Americans today are raised with the mindset that they have to get a college degree, and they have to do it right after they graduate from high school. Some people aren’t academically inclined, and if they try to force themselves into the college mindset they just end up wasting their time and the instructor’s. Others just need some time off before they make up their minds about college. There’s nothing wrong with any of these people – if they go into the work force or the military or whatever, they could end up being very successful and happy with what they do, but they’re going to be miserable if they’re forced into a classroom for two more years, whether it’s at the high school or the college level.

6

I think extending the school year would be a better alternative than making adults stay in school longer. The three-month summer vacation is, IIRC, a relic of the old farmhands-for-harvest days, which is unnecessary in this day and age. Granted, that’d require either more teachers or a better teaching salary to support such a change, but that should be an easy thing for everyone to get be…

Oh, never mind, this idea will never work.

7

I believe that it would be more useful to start madatory schooling 2 years earlier when children are three. They are still impressionable then and have a chance at that age. By the time they are 14 or 15 they know all there is to know about the world and they cannot be told anything. As they get to age 20 they all have a plan and it is going to work just fine, their parents just didn’t know enough. When they get to their mid-thirties, life has bitten them in the ass enough they know what they should have learned but it is too late to do anything.

I think opportunities should be made available to people in their forties that really understand the true value of an education and are willing to be taught.

8

I’m not convinced that the time we already allot to education is well-spent. Looking at what my daughter brings home, there seems to be a heavy “infotainment” factor; a lot of silly emphemera treated as worthy of scholarly interest (which gets even worse in college where you can take a class in Gilligan’s Island studies).

Last week her class was bussed up to Seattle to visit the Experience Music Project, whre they viewed Michael Jackson’s white glove. A few miles away, at the Seattle Art Museum, there’s a show of Spanish imperial Art on loan from el Escorial, of which these kids now remain ignorant.

Sure, I get the idea behind all this; train them to approach what’s already accessable as a legitimate field of study, then see who can apply this same approach to worthy materials. I don’t agree, though. Put irregular verbs and prime numbers and all that other boring crap in front of them and, to make it interesting, make it a competition to see who masters it best. kids are going to competetive anyway; why not make it over something worthwhile instead of over who has the best shoes? And remind them that those people who drive the nice cars and live in the nice houses got them by mastering really boring stuff like dentistry or tort appeals.

9

I’m with Slithy Tove and would rather have us decrease the required amount of mandatory schooling, and increase the quality of the education we give kids and teenagers. Let them read controversial novels, and even more importantly, controversial history. Give them better written text books that intrigue, rather than the horribly dry drek we give them now. There’s great amounts of room for improvement, it’s just we keep making things worse and worse as to not offend anyone it seems.

10

Yeah, I could get behind that idea, especially if we started teaching children to read when they are three and four. The younger a child is taught to read, the better reader they’ll be later on. Schools often don’t start reading lessons until second grade, which I believe is way too old. It’s no wonder that some kids (like my sister, who didn’t really start reading until she was eight) have no interest in books–they weren’t raised in a literate environment. I also think that seventeen is a bit old for compulsory schooling. I was seventeen when I started college, and I didn’t feel out of place academically. If we shift back the school ages, people would be able to enter the work force earlier. Finding good day care for young children would be less of a concern.

Also, quality not quantity. Two more years of a typical public education would be a disservice to teenagers.

11

There are other ways to encourage people to go to colllege…

Did you know that you can take a year’s break after high school - or even several years break - and then decide what you really want to study, if anything?
If school was 2 years longer people would still normally go straight from school to university…

But think of the downsides… all those people who would be forced to endure extra schooling, the rising schooling costs with no real economic benefit, and how a large number of corporate guys, etc, only have a high school education. (Bill Gates only did some college, and in the new series of the Apprentice there will be lots of entrepreneurs who have no education beyond high school - i.e. they have “street smarts”)

12

I’ve heard that taking a year or two off between HS and college will hurt your chances of getting a private scholarship. I don’t have a cite, it’s just something I’ve heard–that taking a few years off makes you look like a slacker.

I wish sometimes that I had taken a year off after HS, or taken some time off after I transferred. But my parents wouldn’t let me, I had to go straight through. I think a lot of parents have similar expectations, and if they’re paying for college it’s really their decision.

13

Gonna have to call for a cite for this – my son just started Kindergarden four months ago, and he gets regular reading assignments in school already, along with “homework” that consists of (among other things) 15 minutes or more of parents reading to children. Granted, some of these reading lessons are very simple (“I like to play”), but the idea that kids don’t get taught reading until the second grade sounds far-fetched to me.

14

My sister’s school (public school, regular classes). They taught them the alphabet in kindergarten and simple words in first grade, but they didn’t start reading whole sentences and stories until second. I think the progression was the same when I was in school, but I entered school knowing how to read so I didn’t have to sit in on the basic classes, I was in the accelerated one. So yeah, I guess they start teaching kids the components of language before second grade but it’s not enough to read a whole chapter book.

15

Mandatory? No. I can see making more education options available to folks that age, but there’s already too much mandatory schooling as it is.

What stopped you from taking another 2 years of voluntary education, like community college?

What’s the connection between this and two more years of mandatory schooling? If they felt rushed in college, wouldn’t it make more sense to make college longer?

16

Devil’s advocate time:

Can I ask why everyone assumes it would be a good thing if more people went to college? It seems to me that we have a problem in that TOO MANY people are going to college - people who don’t really belong there.

I’m not that old, but I can remember a time when tradesmen (carpenters, electricians, etc) were respected, had pride in their work, and were in ready supply. Now it seems that there is always a shortage of skilled trades, and the people who do the work see their jobs as low-level grunt work. They are there to collect a paycheck and go home.

That’s what happens when a society chooses to devalue such career paths.

On the other side of things, I sure saw a lot of people in college who didn’t belong there. They take meaningless majors to ‘broaden themselves’, but come out ignorant anyway, except with $50,000 in student loan debt.

Some people just aren’t cut out for higher education. This isn’t a knock on them - I have a great respect for honest tradespeople who have an artistic eye and a work ethic. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, and in fact these are traits that we’re devaluing constantly.

The problem with higher education, in my opinion, is that it’s heavily subsidized. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Make student loans easy to get, cut tuition with government grants, and tell kids that they’re nobody if they don’t go to college, and you’ll have a glut of kids in college that shouldn’t be there, won’t learn anything (or learn trivial things), and use up four years of their lives when they are healthiest and most productive.

There’s another flip side to this - I know a LOT of college graduates who stopped learning the day they graduated. Their textbooks wind up sold or collecting dust on a shelf, but now they are ‘educated’, so they don’t have to bother with any more learning. On the other hand, I know people with high school diplomas or less who wish they could have gone to college, and as a result develop a lifelong devotion to learning. Many of them wind up far more educated than your average college grad.

Another side effect of cheap, easy education - people tend to take easy degrees. Go to countries like India, and see what their college students are taking - Engineering, medicine, science. Look at colleges in the U.S., and see what kids are taking - Sociology, political science, multicultural studies, art… We have a glut of people with useless degrees, and a shortage of doctors and engineers. Make it harder to get into college, and make it more expensive, and you’ll help ensure that people get educations in fields that are likely to pay back their investment.

And you know what? If you slouch through college on the Budweiser program, getting a solid ‘C’ average and taking the easiest courses you can, you will graduate IGNORANT. But you sure won’t think so.

17

Hey, if it’s good enough for the President of the United States…

18

I thought it was already expensive enough as it is in the US…
in some places in Europe I think it’s free. And in Australia it costs about US$2500-4000 per year for courses, at any university (except the extremely rare private ones). (the charge per year depends on the course. I think nurses and teachers, etc, have the cheapest fees, and laywers, engineers and doctors have the highest fees - and you don’t have to repay any of your fees until you earn over $30,000 per year, and there is no interest, though the debt is adjusted for inflation)
If you want less people to do a course, then in Australia at least, the government could probably tell the university that you’ll only give them enough funding for a certain number of places - and then it would be harder for students to get into that course.
BTW, a side-effect of allowing all (not just lucky ones who get scholarships) poor sufficiently intelligent people easy access to degrees (e.g. the Australian system) is that it means that formerly poor educated people would be more widespread and so amongst poor communities, it would be more common for them to have ties to educated types who could be a positive influence on them… e.g. the educated guy might help their poor friends become more literate, etc.

19

Sam Stone: (continued)

I agree… I think part of the problem is that people come straight from high school often with little idea of what career they want to have. There are hundreds of kinds of jobs… (some are quite obscure though). It is very common for people to change their career direction at least once during their life… some people just change more… If some courses don’t have very good job prospects then the government could decrease the funding for those courses. And it could make courses for needed professions cheaper… including ones for manual labour.

20

Here’s what I’d do:

  1. Take a lot of the state funding that goes into general revenues for colleges and university, and and re-allocate it to scholarships. Make sure the kids who will get the most out of university are the ones who get the funding.

  2. Change the student loan program. There are too many poor kids taking out student loans to fund educations that will not guarantee them jobs that will allow them to pay back the loans. We make this more likely by stretching out the payment period, making it too easy to default, and requiring no payback at all for a long time. Just like those, “No money down, do not pay until 2006!” sales - they encourage bad decision-making.

I’d tie student loans to ability to repay. If a student wants to study left-handed basketweaving in college, he’d better be able to show that he’s got a plan for paying back the student loan, before he gets it. Certain faculties would be easier to qualify than others. For example, it should be relatively easy to get student loans to study engineering or medicine or law, and relatively hard to get them to study ancient Egyptian languages.

I’m all for breadth of knowledge, but I also think you can be a well-rounded person without university. I also think that university alone is not sufficient for becoming well-rounded.

A lot of kids that go to college don’t realize how badly it can screw them up if they choose the wrong major. Take two people - one goes straight into the work force after high school. Another goes to college to study romance languages. After four years, the first person may have a professional certification in a trade, a good start at a career, a $40,000 income, and perhaps already have gotten a start on home ownership and a family. The college kid comes out with $50,000 in student loan debt, no job prospects, and a degree that won’t pay the bills.

Degress in fields that do not have obvious career paths used to be considered luxuries - something that someone might take if they were from a wealthy family. Dad would send junior to school to broaden his horizons so that he’d be more prepared to take over the family business. That sort of thing.

But now we’ve told kids that everyone should go to college, it’s their right, and they can study whatever they want and be lauded for it. But if you are poor and have to work for a living, it’s just poor decision making to go to college and borrow money so that you can indulge your curiousity for four years. But the bills aren’t due for years, so what the hell.