Let Teenagers Try Adulthood Analysis

Schooling has a lot of problems that need a lot of solutions. Many of these problems stem from the fact that the American school system is notorious for wasting the time of students and teachers. Students rarely get the chances to learn and experience topics that not only interest them but are also topics that have the potential for being important in their future careers. Time is also wasted during standardized tests that do not give American students an accurate representation of their intelligence compared to the intelligence of others worldwide.

Leon Botstein, the President of the Bard College, deals with students every day. In his piece Let Teenagers Try Adulthood he goes through a list of several of the problems in high schools and follows that with a list of possible solutions. One of the main problems that Botstein finds is that students entering his university are rarely prepared. And that

“by the time those who graduate from high school go on to college and realize what really is at stake in becoming an adult, too many opportunities have been wasted and too much time has passed” (paragraph 5). Many high schoolers do not actively search for activities that will benefit them in the future, instead, they focus on what will benefit them in the present. Botstein’s main solution stems from his belief that high school is obsolete and that students should graduate at sixteen instead of eighteen. While I do believe that many opportunities for life-learning are missed out on during high school, I do not think that graduating high school early would be a good solution. When a teenager turns sixteen they can, in most places, get a job and drive a car all by themselves; both major leaps towards independence. If the independence of graduating high school was added onto this, it could very easily become very overwhelming. There is also the fact that there is still a lot to learn in the final two years of high school.

The fact remains that as students, we are forced to sit six hours a day listening to teachers drone on about how mitochondrion are the powerhouse of the cell or about how with the two side lengths and the Pythagorean theorem I can find the length of the third side of a triangle. While these can and are helpful if you wish to work in the science or math fields, only a small fraction of students plan to be involved in these fields. Todd Gitlin, a university professor, believes that the current and boring curriculum is not one that should be focused on. He instead believes that an education based on liberal arts education is the best possible foundational education a person can receive.

Along with pushes for liberal arts based education, there have also been pushes for educations based on the technique “learn by doing”. When students “learn by doing” they are given the opportunity to test out different occupations; engineering, computer coding, healthcare, and a multitude of other fields. The implementation of curriculums where students get opportunities to actually try a potential occupation gives them students multiple advantages. Not only do they now have experience, but they can also see - for free - if it is really what they wish to spend their life doing.

For the last twelve years I have attended four public schools; an elementary school, a middle school, and two high schools.

For each of these twelve years I, along with the rest of the nation, have been forced to waste several hours taking standardized tests that make a teacher, a school, or a school district look good. Never have these standardized tests benefit me. The scores received by the students do not reflect where America lies on the education scale worldwide if it did the scores would be lower.

There are very few solutions for standardized testing because I understand that it is very important to see how students rank on school, state, national, and global levels. It is the scores themselves that I have the biggest problem with. As a country that puts more and more money into education and the tests every year, the scores should be reflective of that. While the scores show that Americans are excelling when the scores are compared to those of other nations, it is obvious that there are completely different scales, and American is usually on the lower

one.

In a report by Floyd Norris about math skills of forty different countries, America ranked twenty-eighth. That is not the number Americans were expecting. The overly easy standardized tests of America have given Americans a false belief of their intelligence levels. Of the Americans who took the test, 72% of them felt that they were good at math. The test proved them wrong. Of the Chinese who took the test, 25% of them felt they were good at math. The test also proved the Chinese, the country who scored the highest, wrong.
Wasting time is a tradition among high schools around the country, whether they acknowledge it or not. Students are rarely prepared to take on the college, let alone the world after they receive their diploma. Of the few that have an idea of what they wish to do for the rest of their lives, only a few of them have been given the opportunity to experience their choices. Time is also wasted by tests that do not truly measure the level or the potential level of intelligence of students.