To Work at 16

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The New York Sun

Did I mention that I’m a high school dropout?

Not that it has been much of a problem: I do have a bachelor’s and some other degrees. After 10th-grade, I entered Simon’s Rock Early College, affiliated with Bard, where students start college work at age 15 or 16. I missed the prom, thank God, and learned to drive a little late, but otherwise I’m doing pretty well.

The report on reforming our school system just released by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce urges that my experience be less unusual for American students. One of its main ideas is that mandatory schooling begin at age 3 and end after 10th-grade. After that, going on to colleges and universities would be one of several choices available. Another choice, equally typical and just as well-funded, would be vocational training.

This idea would hardly surprise our great-grandparents. Before World War II, fewer than half of students went beyond the ninth-grade. The concept of a four-year college education as a rite of passage to middle-class adulthood only developed in the wake of the GI Bill. It has become a waste of resources, both monetary and personal.

When I attended Rutgers in the early 1980s, it seemed that every third undergraduate, many of them first-generation college students, was majoring in economics. These students, however, were interested much less in Keynesian theory than in preparing for a job in finance. Students actually interested in learning for its own sake, as opposed to “getting that piece of paper,” were distinctly thin on the ground.

And while I was teaching at U.C. Berkeley for several years, the connection between most of a typical undergraduate’s coursework and the administrative-type jobs the student sought after graduation seemed disturbingly thin.

I see nothing disturbing in an alternate universe where most students of what we now think of as freshman age are, instead, out in the world learning to ply a trade, be it in an office, workshop, or conservatory. Instead, they spend six years after 10th-grade gamely tolerating several dozen courses, most with only the vaguest relationship to the jobs they will seek — or who they will be as people.

Obviously, however, the solution is not to strand students with an eighth-grade education as it currently stands in America. Rather, education should be “front-loaded.” In much less time than we take students’ time up with now, they could be given a substantial but no-nonsense education tooled to preparing them to be productive citizens. This can be done without the pretense that any but a few Americans need to be plied with “book learning” over several years beyond this basic toolkit.

The past gives hope here. Although there is a certain idealization of public schooling in the days of yore, the typical eighth-grader a century ago had a facility in, for example, writing that few of today’s college graduates could even approximate. The eloquent letters written by Civil War soldiers are a famous example.

Leon Botstein, Simon’s Rock and Bard’s president, must be happy about the commission’s report. In one of my favorite books, “Jefferson’s Children,” he is dismayed that “our students can barely do what their foreign counterparts did two to four years earlier,” and outlines a content-rich educational program ending at 10th-grade, stressing critical thinking. He argues that students can acquire these skills long before age 18. In fact, Mr. Botstein says, in a world where sexual maturity and the realities of life hit students at an earlier age than they did in the past, “eighteen is too old to start a serious education.”

According to Mr. Botstein’s vision, college education would be one of many choices a young person might make, like choosing graduate study today. Vocational training, meanwhile, would not merely be a pathway to cutting squid on an assembly line, but to careers in art, music, or sports. Fans of Howard Gardner’s cuddly “multiple intelligences” thesis would, presumably, be on board here.

The commission report notes that this arrangement would free up more money for education at younger ages. Also imagine the death of the assumption that sketchy remedial courses in college — now taught at 90% of them — could make up for what is not taught earlier.

And what a savings in the time we force vital young people to waste. I recall a Rutgers student in 1984 assigned Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” All she saw in it was comedy: “This guy is so sad and he goes around moaning and crying and finally he just kills himself.” She was smart, but she didn’t happen to be into books for books’ sake. Most human beings aren’t, and there is nothing wrong with that: Life is about much, much more than the printed page.

She eventually went into sales. She should have done so years before. In the commission and Mr. Botstein’s vision, she would have had her horizons broadened to a useful but practical degree by age 16 and been working at her corporate job at 18, while certain bookworms elsewhere indulged, by choice, in wrapping their heads around Goethe.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.


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