High School Curriculum Change

A Recommendation for changing High School Education in California

My long experience teaching has convinced me that most of the youngsters in California secondary schools will profit very little from the last four or five years of their state mandated and financed education.

Most have little interest in traditional academic subjects and instinctively know that, for them, time spent in high school will be more like serving a prison sentence than in preparation for a brighter future. The great majority does not like, and in fact, actively despises school.

Instead of wasting years of time and millions of dollars in traditional high school education, youngsters could be separated at age fourteen, most to commence a short but intensive program of technical training which would prepare them for some work they could perform as juveniles and perhaps later as adults.

Only those students which show a definite aptitude and desire to study academic subjects should be tracked into small classes of hopefully enthusiastic, academically oriented scholars--instead of presenting more or less useless, watered-down "academic" subjects to overcrowded classrooms full of lethargic, unwilling teenagers

This will free good teachers of academic subjects to teach willing students rather than to oversee and discipline unruly masses and allow good teachers with technical skills to teach those who need them.

Secondary school education in its present form for most young men and women is not a golden gateway to opportunity but a portal to wasted time and frustration.

Tomasito, 2008

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