HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023915.jpg

Restructuring the University 169 As it stands now, we can’t. High schools teach what colleges tell them to teach. Recently I was looking for a picture of the man who was principal of my elementary school many years ago. I wanted to put it in a speech I was about to give. So, I went to the P.S. 247 (Brook- lyn) website and discovered that it is now a “New York City College Partnership Elementary School.” When I finished laughing, I started to wonder when this “everyone must spend their entire childhood worrying about getting into college” nonsense would end. PS. 247 was not a great bastion of learning or a fun place in the 1950s, and I can only imagine how awful it is now. I wondered why P.S. 247 now had to be a college prep elementary school. A commenter on what I wrote noted that the old trade schools, which used to dominate the New York school system, were serving mostly minority populations and this had to stop; so now “everyone can go to college” is the man- tra of the equity folks. But the problem is, of course, that what is being bought with all this college preparation is the right to be an unemployed English ma- jor instead of the airplane mechanic you might have been if you had gone to Aviation High School. High school has become all about college, and college is all about scholarship and research, so what is left? So who teaches students to think clearly? Who teaches students about the possibilities there are for work that might interest them? Who teaches students how to get along with one another, and who teaches people how to communi- cate well? Certainly not the high schools, which are obsessed with test score preparation, which means rote memory for the most part. Certainly not the colleges, which are run by faculty who do re- search and who think mostly about that. One possible answer is community colleges, but when someone like me suggests that skipping college and going to community college instead to learn an actual skill might be a good idea for most students, that suggestion is disregarded as being on the lunatic fringe. The good news is that because of all this craziness, there is a big opportunity to build an alternative, which I will discuss in Chapter 14. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023915