Image by sarah sosiak via Flickr
I’m sitting in a math tutorial at about 8:45 this morning, longing for that cup of coffee I was just moments too late to snatch before class, when my professor recognizes a lull in the class and asks a question.
“I’m talking next month to High School math teachers. What should I tell them?”
I don’t care much about math. It’s a means to an end for me and I never felt short-changed by my math education in High School. The root of the question he asked has been a persistent one for me though. My class (by which I mean New Brunswick’s graduating grade 12′s of 2005) were told a lot of nonsense, misdirected, and sometimes outright screwed.
I wrote a long post and erased it. Everyone is trying their best, and there is no real blame, but High School should do the following.
- prepare students to deal with income tax, loans, bills, and personal finance.
- teach students the truth about Canada’s history with relation to First Nations
- allow discussions about controversial subjects in Canada – bilingualism, immigration, health care, and foreign policy
- expand career counseling to encompass at least an entire credit course
- open pathways to trades and increase funding to technical departments
- Overlap. It can be done. There are novels about Science, there is a history of science, there are beautiful stories about discoveries, perseverance and competition. For an example, see Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Why do we only see numbers and figures? When we study history, why don’t we talk about how people cooked, how they built houses, and how the poor lived?
High School is so focused on preparing students for University they fail to realize that University is trying to prepare them for High School. What I mean by this that High School tries to teach critical thinking, but prescribes the outcomes to everything so that students end up regurgitating. University really does allow students to think critically, but by that point this skill is a worthless commodity in a job market that demands knowledge in the form of testable outcomes (i.e. real skills).
A great prof of mine (quoting someone else no doubt) said – University is the new Church. It demands a heavy tithe. It grants a societal class. It accrues power to itself absurdly and punishes those who question it’s authority. Those who follow it mindlessly are granted a position of mediocrity and servitude.
I’m going to keep this metaphor. That makes High School a Sunday school. What I wish is that our children, instead of singing mindless hymns, are preparing to become spiritually critical. They should not enter the congregation blindly when they come of age, but enter it knowing who they are, what they want, and why they are tithing.
High School students now are unprepared and unaware of the fact that Universities will gladly take 40,000$ in exchange for allowing you to flower into your potential.
If you don’t USE university it will USE you. That’s what I wasn’t prepared for. That’s what I wish they’d told us. That’s what I’d tell you.
