Replacing the
2 key issues:
1)Earlier physical maturity: American high school was designed for fifteen to
eighteen year olds who were children only beginning their journey to adulthood.
It is now filled with young adults of the same age.
2) High schools offer an inadequate solution to the
problem of how best to motivate and educate American adolescents. Tension between goals of access to all and quality of
outcomes – US has supported open access at the cost of watering down the
curriculum for all.
The inadequacies of high school and the
resulting devaluation of its diploma have only deepened the role of high school
as merely a transitional phase in education p 88.
America has a more
elaborate educational system that spreads over more years, reaches more people,
and ends up with results for the entire population that are worse than those
countries with educational system that are explicitly not democratic and on the
surface offer fewer opportunities for advanced education p 91.
Once again one comes upon the
conflict between a rigid school system and earlier maturation. Too many
teachers spend too much time just keeping order p 124.