A friend recently sent me news of an experiment allowing high school students to earn their diploma early and begin college attendance by their junior year. All I can say on behalf of America’s direly under-represented youth is, FINALLY!
Modern high schools do little if anything to prepare students for the “real world”—instead, they threaten students with this “real world” like its some abstract day of apocalyptic reckoning. (Though for many of the students produced by these institutions, I doubt this is an inaccurate assertion.) Sure, the “real world” has its down moments, but its promises and its unlimited liberty are worth every ounce of patience you invest in it. And yet I vividly recall ominous threats about this veiled “real world” from my high school instructors (when I was already working near full time anyway). Now I realize that the self-loathing fears in this “real world” complex are the stuffs of those who never learned, or never even tried, to deal with that world on its own terms.
If I could give one piece of advice to young, struggling students it would be to internalize this very fact as early as possible in your life: throughout life, others will try to sandbag you with their fears of the world. Occasionally, they will even succeed, whether or not it is within your control to prevent them from doing so. With a misplaced but strangely dedicated ethic, people will shovel their shit at your door step until you can barely push it open. But as soon as you realize the futility of their labor and the self-defeating, self-sabotaging trap in which they have made themselves slaves to their moralizing projections, the shit will evaporate and the door will swing wide!
So given the coercive and yet failed nature of the American educational system, at least young students now have the option of opting out of those failings in favor of a path that will greatly help their chances in the real world by providing them with applicable career skills rather than needless exams and endless reiterations of the same learning material. If anything, the modern high school is one’s introduction into a society of the least common denominator; a society in which, by some unspoken standard, everything is made to appeal the crass imagination of a bourgeois, suburban nation. The purpose of American high school is to produce dull worker-consumers, not highly skilled professionals. Foucault would have a field day with the institutional design of high schools as factories of cultural ideology, regimenting their experience of time and the physical bodies of attendees in arbitrary orders of rank and aptitude according to social class. From personal experience, I can honestly say my four-year high school diploma was one of the most useless pieces of paper I ever received in my life. By tenth grade, already working long hours at my first job, I despised the obvious uselessness of high school pursuits and was ready to be on my way. I was bookish and strong, which only led me to the realization that a modern high school is the least helpful and most inept of environments for an eager student.
So I dropped out, and only returned to school when I was threatened with jail time after a long episode of unnecessary harassment by the school I attended. And I did what any other savvy student does who simply doesn’t care about the tedious ordeals of high school: I squeaked by for the remaining two years, working but not really caring about school, writing myself and my friends sick notes so we could ditch and go to the river, the mountains, wherever it was that day. Surrounded by doubts, I aced the SAT’s and went on to the university where I graduated with a near perfect 4.0 GPA.
In spite of my own success, I’m still struck by the fact that my life has been irreparably altered by the slow, even arrested progress that my high school imposed on me and retarded my personal growth. Much the same for my peers, all of whom are now mid-twenties and Mid-Recession, and have yet to get even a glimpse of the opportunities others take for granted. I’m struck by the fact that not only did those extra years cost me a great deal of time, but in a hidden way they can cost one a great deal of money in the form of foregone wages and foregone academic accomplishments in one’s career field. In light of all these issues, the tenth grade diploma is just what (smart) kids need so desperately, and its just what our country needs as we enter a highly skilled economy in which our outmoded, 1950′s styled system of public education flails like the red-headed stepchild of real education that it has become.
