High School Ruined My Life...And No One Seems To Care

In today's data-happy era of accountability, testing and No Child Left Behind, here is the most astonishing statistic in the whole field of education: an increasing number of researchers are saying that nearly 1 out of 3 public high school students won't graduate. For Latinos and African Americans, the rate approaches an alarming 50%. Virtually no community, small or large, rural or urban, has escaped the problem… "Ten years ago," [says a school official] "if we had a problem student, the plan was, 'O.K., let's figure out how to get rid of this kid.' Now we have to get them help…We've doubled the amount we spend per pupil since the '70s, but the problem hasn't budged."
Time Magazine April 13, 06

We have a problem. There’s a problem in this country that no one’s caught. It’s silent, and the silence is growing. It’s the problem of education forgetting about the kids. At a national dropout statistic of 50%, the public still only complains about teacher pensions, lapse discipline, and basically all the people running the place…the public seems to have forgotten whose behind the school gates.

No one seems to know what’s going on. Educators and experts who have never been where this problem leads, who were successful in school and in life, are tasked with coming up with a solution. Despite their “expertise” on the matter, I think we’re asking the wrong people.

We like to think that high school is preparing our kids for a great life. A life where they will be educated, have a great career, make their own decisions, and be self-sufficient. We like to think that our kids are nurtured in the environment that we entrust our children for the majority of their childhood. We trust that their innocence is being protected.

Sadly however, with one of the worse public education systems in the WORLD, American high schools serve as little more than daycare/prisons for America’s unruly youth. The public wants the real deal on what’s going on inside its public schools. Here’s the Real Deal…

High School is the last stop before show time. It’s the airlock before exiting the Matrix and being booted into the rough waters of the Real World. It is a right of passage, designed to strip you of your childhood identity so that you can build a new one akin to the rest of the world, and find yourself in a way that is productive and beneficial to society. But it doesn’t, it fails miserably. It tries to follow the military model as much as lawsuits will allow and goes half way, coming up dangerously short and leaving kids broken down but not built back up.

Public High School’s are not designed to create senators. That is the Private Schools job. Public High School is designed to create a perpetual work force and ensure the creation of a permanent middle class (the absence of a middle class is what brings many country’s to their knees). It’s become more about creating jobs than about educating kids. School’s support teachers, laborers, construction workers, custodial staff, security guards, research analysts, secretaries, food service workers, police officers, public health officials, building inspectors, psychologists, tech advisors, electricians, secretaries, publishing companies, board members to make sure everyone does their jobs, and non-teachers who coach sports which generate revenue. What is the function of the public high school? To prepare students for real life. In other words…to fill these jobs.

The process starts by breaking the student down. The system mimics the military model but goes dangerously half way, leaving the students broken down but not built back up. There is a way that school teaches material that does not in anyway mimic the outside world, and the job of students is to roll with it, those who can catch on will survive and thrive. Those who can’t are supposedly the ones who will never make it in the real world, so why waste precious limited resources on them?

Curriculum in high school is designed to simulate the work environment. Classwork and homework are assigned in bulk to mimic “quotas” and production standards of a middle class labor or desk job. Busy work is 40% of a total grade whereas tests—that make sure you actually know the material—are worth about 25%. Curriculum is not challenging and is slowed down to snail pace to accommodate the non-english speaking students of illegal aliens while busy work is still assigned in bulk. Somehow more homework equals more of a challenge, especially considering that the only thing separating the curriculum of and AP biology class and a regular biology class is the work load, not the subject matter. This is catastrophic considering that everyone and their mother has ADD now, and 80% of dropouts are ADD (ADD is an invention however, ADHD is the serious disorder that warrants special ed). Studies have shown that speeding up the curriculum would increase interest in subject matter ten fold, but does the school care? Of course not. Students are intentionally placed in stressful environments to teach them how to perform under stress, and forget about creativity unless you are in the AP program, which is the only way you are going to get into a good 4 year University and have a great life. Everyone else...they’ll be working for the AP students (forget about all of the cheating rings that have been busted in the AP programs).

Think child labor doesn’t exist in the US? Think again. Sports programs in High Schools get paid $100,000 for bringing home a regional championship, even more if they take a state title for the team. If a lone athlete gets scouted by a college, the high school gets paid an allowance for the athlete, and the coach of the program gets an incentive for each league championship and a bonus for every level after that. A good sports program can fund an entire school 100 times better and faster than a good academic program. Compton High School is carried by its track team. It seems as if athletes are given all of the resources because public education knows that students have a better chance of getting an athletic ride into a University than an academic ride. Maybe this is why more teachers are lenient toward athletes. Students are pushed harder than almost any child laborer in any poor country to the point of repeated injury and hazed so bad so as to make sure the ones who will rack in revenue won’t quit. The only thing that keeps it from being child labor is the fact that students are choosing to be there. Sports has ruined a lot more lives than it has enhanced.

Lets talk about High School’s take on creativity. Creativity is very important and individualism is very important to the American Ideal. In high school, creativity does not exist. “50 minute class periods are no place to teach creativity,” argue teachers.” Kids grow the most physically and mentally between the ages of 15 and 18, these need to be the years where they are allowed to explore their world and develop their own insights and ideas, not be shoved into the abyss of the drab ideal and shocked into submission. In high school, the message of dreaming big and aiming high is replaced by “play it safe and don’t be stupid, the real world is no place for trailblazers.”

What about teachers? I have a lot to say about teachers.

There is such a huge discrepancy in what makes a teacher a good teacher that most good ones get screwed. Most of the Young Liberal teachers burn out within the first few years while the Old Crusty teachers can’t be fired because they get tenure. Its ballsy for a teacher to even step up to teach high school, but its all too common for them to fail. No one in their right mind teaches high school. All the student-teachers I’ve met: middle school, elementary school, kindergarten. Mention high school and they run. The American Teenager is the epitome of a challenge because they are smart enough to know what they want and what’s going on around them, but stupid enough to not have the experience to deal with it.

That’s why High School teachers have to be strong. A great teacher can change a kid’s life. I’ve known a few good teachers though, the ones that succeeded in being extraordinary teachers have been of the following, and these people were crazy to begin with:

A) X-Military (One Navy SEAL, a Marine and an Airman)
B) Olympic Wrestler
C) Martial Artists
D) Former CDC agent
E) NFL Wide Receiver
F) Former Police Officer
G) Mother of 5 boys

However, most of the teachers that students in need get stuck with are bitter professionals who have failed in their professions in the real world. The saying is true, “Those who can’t, teach.” To all those who teach high school because they failed in the professions of with they teach, and pushed the good teachers out of work, to this I say the following. Go sell candy like the rest of the student you humiliate. School is about kids, not you. It is your job to be superhero’s because of the lives you are entrusted with.

It’s true that there are limited resources, that the standards the school is required to meet are in many ways unrealistic, that teachers are over-tasked and underpaid. The problems with education are so spread out that sometimes it seems hopeless trying to fix them. We turn to the worlds greatest minds begging for an answer, like I said above, I think we are asking the wrong people.

If you asked me, if you asked students who have been there, and teenagers who are going through it now, they would give you this answer…

People could start by caring.

After 4 years of emotional catastrophe and trying to please everybody, I finally realized the only lesson they were trying to teach me. No one gave a damn. No one outside of my extended family who had been nagging on the laces of my shoes for my entire life gave a damn whether I lived or died and I could go jump off a bridge for all they cared. The world doesn’t want me, the world doesn’t love me, the world doesn’t exist for me and I am nothing…That was what a teacher said to me the day before I left. If you can’t find reasons to believe in us, and you’re bigger and smarter than us, then how can we stupid kids find reasons to believe in ourselves, especially when you say we’re wrong? The expelling of the soul from the body is the most painful process a life form can undergo. The period in which a life realizes that there are no special things inside of it is like squeezing the yolk out of an egg though a tiny hole in the shell. The mush that comes out can never be put back in, and that’s what American High Schools leave their children with, mush for dreams and a receipt for a piece of paper, the ironic thing being that half of the words written on that paper will be too high above the graduates reading level.