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Everybody’s supposed to trudge through four years of high school, then another four (or five or six or seven) years of college to qualify for a decent job, writes linguist John McWhorter. “College for all” has become arbitrary, purposeless and even absurd, he writes in a New York Times commentary.
McWhorter quotes Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and author of Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture:
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 systems that are explicitly not democratic and on the surface offer fewer opportunities for advanced education.
“Childhood education” should end at age 16, after a very enriched 10th-grade curriculum, proposed Botstein. Some will be ready for a college education, others to “take their places in the working world.”
McWhorter left high school after two years to attend Bard’s early college program, then transferred to Rutgers. He met some students who wanted to learn and many more who were jumping through hoops.
That was 40 years ago, he writes. Now, there are many more ways to acquire college-level knowledge. In-person instruction may be better, and the residential “college experience” has value — but at very high cost. “We could be a society of solidly educated people if we improved and bolstered public education while reclassifying a college education as a choice among many,” writes McWhorter.
I think “college for all” has lost credibility — but I’m not at all sure we will improve K-10 education to create “solidly educated” Americans who can benefit from online college classes or high-level job training.