Assembl line education 1st draft for essay 1

Thousands of Americans believe that high schools across the nation teach and prepare young adults for the real world. The truth of the matter is, high school has become a boring place that students are required to attend, but aren’t pushed academically. Theodore Sizer made an excellent example of this in his book, Horace’s Chapters. In a chapter called What High School Is, Sizer breaks down a student’s entire day. The purpose of Sizer including every minute of the day was to reveal to the reader how extremely boring a day of high school has become. The high school education of today has been reduced down to a series of tests and busy work. The high school level curriculum has been crippled by the state and national budget cuts. As a result, the class instructors are paid next to nothing for their work, and frankly, we the tax payers aren’t getting what we pay for. You can look around your house and see changes everywhere, but the way high school is taught has not changed in decades. Public high schools have rapidly transformed into day cares for teenagers.
All adult American’s believe a high school education is something that will help prepare adolescents for the real world. On the other hand, they do not realize that this idea is mainly false. Pupils do not learn in high school they are more or less kept busy for four years. High school is more like a full time job, than a secondary educational society. “School is conceived as the children’s workplace, and it takes young people off of parents’ hands and out of the labor market during prime time labor hours” (Sizer 136). The truth is it’s cheaper for a lower income family to send their children to school, than feed them at home.
Secondly, the pupils are taught at an extremely speedy pace. The teachers are required to touch on a long list of different materials. They make sure the students comprehend the minimal amount of substance and fast forward to the next topic. The teachers have little say over the subject matter. Their pay depends on whether or not they accomplish the state course curriculum for that subject. The most important material of a curriculum usually comes at the end of each semester and is left out due to review for state and national post semester test. The students and teachers both are graded on the scores of these tests. Learning has been abolished, and in its place stands a totalitarian society that revolves around “Gateway” and “Terra Nova” tests scores.
High school graduation was once a prestigious accomplishment, but now anyone can graduate. There is no longer an academic push for students to learn. Any able bodied mind can graduate from high school with a 3.0 average. Teachers don’t care if students slack their way through a semester. Throughout a high school career pupils are forced to take several random subjects. These subjects are mere titles, because students are taught such a small amount of material. “A great deal of material is supposed to be “covered”; most of these courses are surveys, great sweeps of the stuff of their parent disciplines” (Sizer 137). Furthermore, rarely can a high school graduate recall all the things they skimmed over in one semester. Tax payers are getting shafted every year by paying theses schools to teach and prepare their offspring for the “real world”. Essentially adolescents have control of their education and can take bull shit classes for the entire duration of their high school career. “The adolescents are supervised, safely and constructively most of the time, during the morning and afternoon hours, and they are off the labor market. That is what high school is all about” (Sizer 138).
The education earned by high school teenagers is not worth the time or money that is put into it. There just isn’t enough time for a teenager to thoroughly learn the concepts of Algebra or English in a fifty minute class session. High school is more about social interaction and “cliques” than about learning. It has become a large scale daycare for young adults.