Inadequate Secondary Education in the United States

‘Tis education forms the common mind;

Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

Pope – Moral Essays

Two years ago, I used to work at a photo shop in downtown Philadelphia. Except for me, the only foreigner, there were five Americans working there. Once, we talked about the American life in the beginning of the twentieth century. To support my opinion, I used an example from a short story called “The Gift of the Magi” by a famous American writer O. Henry. It was a very shocking experience for me to find out that nobody knew who O. Henry was or what he had done for the world literature.

Since then, I met a lot of American people with a lack of basic cultural knowledge and, at the same time, with an outstanding professional expertise. Very quickly, I figured out that the root of this problem is in the secondary school education. The American secondary school pays too little attention to producing students with well-rounded education substituting the “what” with the “how”. Placing an undue emphasis on the methods of teaching and studying (the “how”) at the expense of the material being taught and studied (the “what”) makes the choice of what to teach of secondary importance. A weak and disintegrated curriculum is a source of another problem. Excessive attention to the American culture and inadequate attention to the culture of the rest of the world lead American people to a false confidence in the superiority of the American culture. However, the fact is that American “high school graduates are ranked low compared to other countries” (Bowsher, 146).

Many people may say that I exaggerate the problem, because the United States is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world and this fact is directly associated with a quality education. As to some lack of cultural education, they say, it can be filled at the higher educational level in college. Thus, these problems cannot be so global. Unfortunately, they are just so global.

Evidently, the college education in the United States retains high standards that enable the U.S. to maintain its technology at the cutting edge. But students coming from high schools are often not ready for a more advanced study and must waste their time in noncredit courses (Burstein, par. 1). Alexander Burstein, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the Iowa State University, describes his view of this situation:

To my surprise, a lot of students may not know how to put parentheses correctly in an algebraic, even arithmetic, expression… [Some] couldn’t simplify a fraction like “zero over one”... In general, I feel that somehow students are not prepared for courses where logical reasoning, rather than applying ready-made formulas, is required. It looks like this is what they know after school and even after the calculus sequence. It is just plug-and-chug knowledge rather than knowing how to derive a result. Logical arguments, proofs are the heart of math and, in some way, students should be effectively taught the basics of this at least in high school.

The situation that occurs in math and science is just as bad as the situation with the liberal arts. For example, only 21 percent of high school students read “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck and only 27.6 percent know that Tennessee Williams wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Glass Menagerie”( Ravitch, Finn, 276). Undoubtedly, students can fill some lack of cultural education in college, but the time spent on college education is three times less than that spent in secondary school, so it is probably unreasonable to start from scratch after twelve years of study. If colleges “get the products of the secondary school education” (Burstein, par. 1) then they should get a fully prepared product, not a raw material.

If we add up all the time students spend in secondary school we will come up with numbers somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 hours for their school life (Bowsher, 147). Much of this time is wasted on lessons simply aimed at entertaining students to hold their attention rather than on building their cultural and scientific base. Hence, the next question is: Do teachers know what they should teach? Or in another words: Do teachers have a curriculum? Jack E. Bowsher in his book “Fix School First” says, “Some school have a curriculum document, but no one pays any attention to it” (146). Probably, now is a time to open the eyes to modern world, face the fact that “other countries have a richer set of lessons”(Bowsher, 148) and develop a new “world-class curriculum” (Bowsher, 148) for use in all American schools. Maybe then every American will know how to divide zero by one. Maybe then some American people would not think that Liberia is one of the states in the United States[1] or mistake Spain for France on the map of Europe[2]. Maybe then they will truly value the American culture as well as the cultures of the rest of world.

[1] An actual episode which occurred with my friend Joanne from Liberia. One man asked her to show Liberia on the map of the USA.

[2] A logical conclusion based on statistics of the National Assessment of History and Literature. (Ravitch, Finn, 52).

Works Cited

Bowsher, Jack E. Fix School First. Gaithersburg, Maryland: An Aspen Publication, 2001.

Burstein, Alexander I. Personal Interview. 22 March 2002.

Ravitch, Diane, Chester E. Finn Jr. What do our 17-year-olds know?. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987.