A major in high school? There are a lot of people who haven’t decided on a major when they get to be a college sophomore.
Sandra: “There are millions of people who don’t know what evidence or proof is.” Exactly. And they get to serve on juries.
“Aristotelian LOGIC. The sine qua non of education. And taught now mostly in law school in the slowest, most sadistic and humiliating way possible (socratic method).” How is that so? It worked fairly well for Plato.
And working through Euclid’s Elements would be another good idea.
Back to the main topic: I read every so often that students say “nothing’s relevant” in high school. Many kids just want to be rock stars, or NBA champions.
For technical fields, I read recently in an IT trade magazine that many kids – even in college – aren’t that interested, “because so many IT jobs are going offshore”.
But as someone else pointed out, plumbers aren’t seeing their jobs outsourced. Nor nurses. Nor doctors – but not everyone is cut out to be a doctor. How about pharmacists?
The problem seems only to get worse. Is NCLB part of the solution, or part of the problem? Why is “the test” [cue twilight zone music] such a dread? Doesn’t it ask for what people should know when they get out of school? If it doesn’t, let’s fix it (but not by dumbing it down), if it does, and the students don’t, then the teacher’s unions have some serious ‘splainin’ to do.
Is it really the case that Everbody needs to go to college? Maybe if high schools were more like they were at the beginning of the last century (when a few of them still required Latin), employers would not be so ready to think of high school as a 4-year time period used mainly to sort out the sports jocks from the nerds. And the non-college bound would have a 4-year or so head start on earnings.
