Replacing the American High School

 

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.