How does this, as Marokai said, pretend that if all kids work hard they will be successful.
By making the high school standards so strict and non-negotiable.
Pretty much. I'm all for a well-rounded education and I think the vast majority of this bill is fine & dandy, but the high school section just seems like it's loading the work onto kids, and being entirely inflexible. It requires students do multiple courses in all sorts of subjects
and languages,
and electives,
and mandatory PhysEd.
I've often talked to my mom and my grandparents about education and different subjects as I've grown up and gone through the school system, and my grandmother, a quite well educated woman, used to tell me that what I was doing around the 9-10th grade was something she only had to study if she was going to college!
Quite frankly, and forgive me if this sounds immature but, much of the junk you're taught around the end of the 10th grade through to graduation, is almost entirely unnecessary for most of us. I bet half of the adults on this site have completely forgot some of the advanced mathematics you're taught towards the end of the school
unless they were planning on a career which would use that sort of information from the beginning. (And they spend the first year of college basically rehashing everything you learned at the end of high school anyway.)
Which, by the way, is my point. By the 11th and 12th grade we should be allowing students to drop and pick the classes they
want to take (similar to the way college courses are selected), or only the classes they are
most proficient in instead of forcing ALL of the students to do everything, in addition to electives and mandatory PhysEd. If someone is a star at World History and wants to be a historian or a professor, we shouldn't force him to take Calculus or Physics in the latter half of the high school years. Conversely, if a student is a complete math-whiz and wants to be a scientist, he shouldn't be forced to take advanced world history or advanced English, because I'm pretty sure by now these kids have a grasp on how to read and write, and a basic grasp of history as it's relevant to their lives.
Basically, we should stick with the one-size-fits-all approach, but make it more flexible and workable to the individual student and their individual talent. And by high school, shouldn't be wasting their time forcing them to climb ropes or run the track when there are: A. More important things they could be doing, and B. More effective ways to teach a healthy lifestyle.
