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Monday, June 11, 2012 By Guy Burstein
Advertising
(May 25, 2012) -- The
school system in the United States revolves around the fulfillment of a
list of requirements. Every student who goes to college in California
is sure to have taken everything from English to science. When students
want to personalize their class choice their only opportunity to do so
is in a couple of elective classes each year. Unfortunately, this trend
of forcing every student to learn everything is a harmful and misguided
approach to education.
Getting
accepted into a good school should not rely on making students take
many high school classes that they will not value. You shouldn’t have
prospective engineers learning about aesthetic values and those who want
to learn history doing derivatives. The point of high school should be
to take the classes that you need to be successful, not those someone
else decides are important.
Currently,
it takes 14 classes to fulfill California’s A-G class requirements,
including everything from art to science. Getting accepted into a UC
requires high school students to take 4 more. That’s well over two
school-years worth of classes that may not be useful to a student at
all. What high school should be about instead is taking those classes
which students would find valuable.
Furthermore,
by allowing students to take full control of their schedules, schools
would be able to teach them better as well. It is much easier to explain
19th-century American politics to a group of students who want to be
there than to those who are there to fulfill some alphabetized
requirement. It’s a waste of time for students to spend time in a class
which will not engage them in the fields they wish to be engaged.
Students
do require a general education in order to succeed in life, but by the
time they reach high school, they usually have a vague idea of what
major they wish to pursue. When this happens, the school system should
do a better job of encouraging them instead of forcing them to worry
about an arbitrary list of educational requirements.
If
students had more control over their schedules they would be able to
take full advantage over the classes schools offer. You should allow
students to explore every field in high school. You shouldn’t force them
to.
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