New Curriculum Announced...

Test scores are down. The dropout rate is up. Other countries excel and exceed. We expel and recede. We cut funding. We take away money and add more work. [Don't worry kids--it's happening in the corporate world, too. This education actually has a basis in reality]. We try to stress excellence and preeminence, but rarely reach competence, and in the process, stress teachers and students alike. I wish I had a more favorable report on my own high school experience. It was...like sending your child to play with rocks all day, every day. Only instead of something useful, like counting the stones and doing practical math, they would be fed useless scientific hypotheses about the origin of the rocks. Instead of being imaginative, and creating a mini-Stonehenge or setting them up like soldiers on an historic battlefield, they would be thrown at your child by other children whose parents wouldn’t have cared if they had known.
I no longer fault people for ending their high school career early, for pursuing a GED or simply entering the workforce, picking up far more useful skills than they would have in the classroom. It comes down to a lack of incentive. Do you know that at my high school, students who participated in 'senior skip day', a national institution, were punished, some threatened with having their diplomas withheld? Do you know what we did by being at school? Not a darn thing. Maybe my case is unique, but I doubt it, because I wasn't alone, even at my medium sized, Mid-western academy. I skipped often (had the mother call in for me, bless her), wrote papers on books I never read and dropped them in my teachers' boxes by the end of the day, and still made top grades. I'm not bragging--I think it's pathetic. I got an A on a paper for 'The Sun Also Rises', or maybe 'For Whom The Bell Tolls'. I don't remember because I didn't read the book. I wrote it as Hemingway’s inner monologue, 1/2 in Spanish, and they thought it was the stuff. I got A's in Spanish because I wrote all my homework out in story-form. Even the teachers are bored stiff with the curriculum! The slightest variance, and you'd think they were seeing the atom split or something.
Anyway, that aside, I'd like to announce a new curriculum for all American Public High Schools. [Private schools don't concern me because if you're well off or well connected, you don't even need to be able to tie your shoes in this country--one of 'us' will be doing it for you]. The class structure will be as follows:

School hours will be set from 9am-3pm.
Class Subjects will be: Consumer Applications, Science, Literature, Health & Activity, and 1 personal focus class, with 1.5 hours of lunch/down time.
If any student maintains an ‘A’ based upon work done in a class (and grading will be generous) for at least ½ the year, they will be given an opportunity to branch off and specialize in that subject for the remainder of the year, in a course of study that they will determine for themselves, and then have approved by their teacher.

Here is a brief description of the classes:

Consumer Applications: This is basically a math/numbers class, but if you call it math, no one will show up. This class will go over things like how to balance your checkbook. It will talk about general investments. It may require that a bank account be created, or a bond bought. It will deal extensively with the evil Credit System that is making slaves of our nation. It will help you to understand budgeting, consolidating, saving, and abstaining from purchase. It will not suck because it will already have been needed by everybody in the room for at least three years.

Science: This is called science because it is to be everything that science ought to always have been. It will deal with every branch of the sciences, but put primary emphasis on applying one’s understanding to and researching the students’ practical areas of interest. Topics will include the science of personality (including psychology and sociology), the science of matter (including chemistry, biology and anatomy), the science of history (including anthropology and archaeology), and the science of spirituality (including theology and philosophy). Of course, all of this will be boiled down to its most practical applications. No one is required to know or to even want to know anything about chemistry, but more than likely, somebody will learn what household items can be used to remove stains, what plants can cool burns, and so on. There are many more detailed branches of science that can be pursued in much greater detail, but this is a curriculum for private study, and not something to subject an entire school population to.

Literature: Let’s clear up a myth here. Reading does help destroy illiteracy. However, Reading ‘Great Expectations’, ‘A Separate Peace’, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, and ‘The Pearl’ do NOT. Thank God I had the presence of mind to pick up Stephen King and Ray Bradbury when I was a kid, not to mention Dr. Seuss. Not that those are going to be taught over the ‘classics’ necessarily. What that means is that ‘good reading’ is a pretty subjective concept. No longer will people be forced to read volumes of work that do not interest them. In this class, reading will happen. But, if you can only stomach magazine articles, or Harlequins, or trashy horror novels, then that is what you will read. And you will have to write a short report of what you have read. Just to make sure that you know how to write.

Health & Activity: Gym class? Oh no. Guess what children who don’t excel athletically, who don’t necessarily socialize well in a ‘team’ setting, who find the aggressiveness of adolescents in an adult sanctioned and organized sporting event to be a little too much, to put it nicely, are going to be doing. Well, they aren’t going to be sitting on the bench, or flunked for not participating, or ridiculed in the locker room. There will be indoor and outdoor activities for children to choose from. Chasing butterflies is just as acceptable a means of exercise as is, say, field hockey or pin dodge. And you don’t have to carry pepper spray for when your teammates get all Lord of the Flysy. Supervision in the legal sense may be an issue, but there will be more than enough options available for the students. Bring a yoga mat. Go to work. 8 months later=A+. There will also be a health portion of the class. This is largely going to be a volunteer program, where children seeking answers and help on different issues can do so discreetly and not in front of the class at the black board after a lecture on vaginal yeast infections by the 200lb. soccer coach. There will be some mandated lessons on how to take care of your body, when to do which tests, the value of insurance (another 10-headed demon that is leaping on our collective backs, pulling the dollars from our wallets with its thousands of crooked teeth, leaving severe lumbar damage, etc., you get the picture), and other practical things like that. Because let’s face it, we’re a fat, unhealthy convenience-ridden people, and we need help saying no to fast food and chemically altered groceries.

Personal Focus Class: This should be self-explanatory. If the kid knows what they’re good at, knows what they like, for crying out loud, give them a chance to work at it in school. It will keep them coming back. Much better than the ‘law’, at any rate. If you have no idea what to do, and you need ideas, there will be someone there to toss ideas around with you. This class is not graded based on any prefixed criteria. There is a summation given at the end of the course, a retrospective that looks admirably on where the student began and where they ended up. There is no requirement on finding a subject that fascinates that student, only on trying to find one. The real reward here is learning to develop the kind of character that is willing to look, to learn, to be flexible, to invest in something for enough time to experience it and weigh it against ones own interests and abilities.

Finding what I love to do has helped make me a much more tolerable person. Ask…ask my mother. She would know. Everybody else I know now assumes I’ve just always been like this. Anyway, as much as school contributed to me finding that, it also stole away much of my time, energy and esteem. The program I am proposing seeks to preserve the right of the child be happy about what they are doing, to learn in peace, to develop at their own pace, and to have their individuality respected and nurtured. Herds of cattle have no stars, and children who rise up naturally from a herd are heralded while those who linger or lumber are either shouldered with annoyance or disposed of at the first unnoticed opportunity. But, great individuals can come together and make great teams.

I suppose that beginning a program such as this might be difficult to achieve by the freshmen year. It may be that this should be begun as early as kindergarten. I don’t know. I just draw up the plans. And that alone seems to take forever sometimes…