It’s an old saying that quantity cannot make up for quality.  Sadly, this is all too often forgotten when it becomes inconvenient.  Currently, the federal government is considering a plan to increase the length of the school day, week and year, touting the need to dramatically improve American education in light of the increasing competitiveness of the global market.  It’s a noble cause, and their intentions are the best possible.  Of course, the same could be said of most debacles…

            The lasting inefficiencies in American public education are almost legendary.  One can find as many depressing statistics as one wants, so I’ll stick with one close to home:  according to a recent study, only 21% of graduates of Wyoming high schools are adequately prepared for college.  In the face of such mediocrity, the temptation to provide a fast, easy solution becomes almost unbearable.  I applaud attempting to fix the problem, of course, but ill-considered remedies will often do more harm than good, as any doctor could tell you.  If American public schools were using the time they have well, but were nevertheless being surpassed by longer work hours overseas, the current plan would make sense.  If one actually looks at the differences between domestic schools and the better-performing foreign ones, however, the true picture is quite different. 

Most schools in the developed world require a reasonably similar length of time as the American ones.  The difference emerges in how the time is spent—local classes devote endless hours to going over previously-learned ideas, while Belgian and Japanese ones focus more on teaching new concepts.  The fact that different students can learn at different rates and need different amounts of review is accommodated in their pedagogy by the use of different tracks:  more capable or motivated students are allowed to move ahead and achieve their full potential, while special-needs children are given the opportunity to learn in an environment specifically tailored to their needs.  The end result?  Many graduates are better-trained than their American counterparts, while the rest are still taught as much as they can use.

The obvious advantages of this system have made it ascendant in much of the world, but in this country, it has been largely ignored on the grounds that it is “elitist.”  The claim is politically palatable but logically absurd.  True elitism is the practice of helping the rich, skillful or powerful at the expense of everyone else; an elitist pedagogy would grant all available funds to classes of rich or well-connected learners rather than offering assorted tracks to cover all levels of ability and interest.  The only “elitist” or “undemocratic” aspect of the multi-track system is its admission of the fact that not all people are created identical. 

The truth is that some individuals will be able to profit from accelerated teaching, and some will not.  The current policy of soothing egos by ignoring this reality and teaching to the lowest common denominator does not really serve anyone’s interests, and when the chips are down, this country recognizes it.  During the Cold War, faced with a perceived educational gap with the Soviet Union, the United States deliberately stepped up the pace of its curriculum, preparing a generation for the real world and a job market where employers really care whether or not one knows what one is doing, and won’t dumb down the job.  After the threat faded in 1989, though, the pressure was off, paving the way for the watered-down lessons that are now too often de rigueur.  Now that we are once again paying the price for educators’ so-called “egalitarianism”, America is preparing to once again adjust.  This time though, the politically-correct pretense of a homogenous student body has stifled the solution we used last time.  If we can’t admit that some people learn faster than others, we can’t teach anyone at a pace that leaves some behind.  If we can’t actually improve the efficiency of teaching, we are reduced to cliché fallbacks—“work more!”  “Work differently!”  “Work according to my new vision of education!”  What about “learn more?”