I could certainly have written this article,but I did not. One thing I feel is missing is the soul killing element of the job. This is really depressing, doing this horrible thing to people. You go into it thinking you are helping people. And I still think we are helping some people. But the system is against us. We have students who have operated their whole lives simply by bucking “the system.” I used to think they were putting me on, shocked as they seem to be that they could hand in nothing, or hand in something illiterate, and not pass. “What?!?! I only missed 8 classes (8 out of a twice a week 15 week course)!!! I was THERE. I deserve at least a ‘C’ !!” But the truth is, they are honestly doing as much or more here at the Community College level then they did in High School. They are illiterate. Completely unprepared. They need at least from the 6th grade up repeated. My son, a 7th grader, certainly knows more math and can read and write 10 times better than most of my students at the community college where I try to teach some of the better students.

Of course, I try to teach them all. But they won’t learn. Instead, they put all their available resources into proving why I am at fault for holding them to a standard they have never been held to in their entire lives.

Our public high schools do a great job with the easy to teach students. But the harder students…they just let them slide. The sad thing is, these students end up BELIEVING they have received a high school education, when they have not even come close.

I can’t tell you how many angry parents have confronted me, working on registration nights, angry that they have to pay for “developmental” courses that won’t even count for college credit! They had no idea that their children’s high school teachers and administrators had given up on them, and let them slide on by with not even a 6tth grade education in math or english. I look at them sympathetically, and try to explain that their placement test shows that their child can not read at the 8th grade level, write at the 4th grade level, or compute math problems at the 5th grade level.

Yes, it’s true folks, we are teaching them how to add and subtract here at the community colleges (teaching HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES that is) and teaching them how to conjugate verbs. In ENGLISH that is, not some foreign language. How sad.

I know back in the day, people used to leave school at 8th grade. Personally, I think we should go back to that. At least we would be somewhat more honest about what our children are getting in terms of their public education.

The requirement for a college education is generally making up for the deficiencies in high school. Sadly people do often graduate HS and still mange to be illiterate (using the standard of being able to read “at a 3rd grade level”, which is pretty much a typical newspaper or AP article). I think everyone knows at least one person who you can’t figure out how they made the cut and graduated.

That said, the real lesson of lower education is to “learn how to learn”, while the purpose of upper education is to “learn how to think”. It’s not so much about world literature, but about being able to read something that was written in a different time and interpret it as the writer intended (a useful skill when trying to figure out what your predecessor was thinking when they did _______). It’s not about the lab science as much as it is about understanding process, research, and writing a good proposal.

A lot of people could do better in a trade school, which really is under valued in the US. People think you need a college degree to repair a refrigerator, when what you really need is good refrigeration repair training. It’s true these degrees are unfairly looked down upon, but that’s partially because they are generally closed commercial institutions which churn out graduates. It’s thought of more as “buying a degree” rather than earning.

The real fix is to make high school much more collegiate in terms of academics and interaction (group work, teacher/student interaction), something that needs to be done to be competitive in the world market anyway. Will this ever happen? I have my doubts.

That isn’t to say that people don’t graduate college with weak skills or without a good general education or that there aren’t people out there that do well in spit of a lack of official education but I’d much rather work with a group of people who had at least a Bachelor’s degree than with a room of high school graduates who hadn’t been educated further.

I’ve also felt that a college degree proved that someone could stick with something for at least a few years to jump through the hoops required for graduation.