Critique of Yale's Influence on K‑12 Education

186 Teaching Minds As long as the customers keep coming, as long as people will do anything to get their kids into Yale, Yale will not have to change. Now bear in mind that going to Yale isn’t such a bad experience. This is not my point. But Yale’s attitude (and every other top university’s at- titude) toward what those universities are inherently about is seriously harming the education of every high school student and almost every college student in the country. Yale doesn’t know that it is doing this. The faculty of Yale didn’t wake up one morning and think that destroying the American education system would be a good idea. They never think that subject-based education is a bad thing. They are pro- fessors of subjects, after all. It makes sense to them. Most of the Yale faculty doesn’t think for even a minute about the U.S. high school system, or the community college system, or the thousands of other colleges in the United States. Yale professors are thinking about their research, ideas, and projects. Yale administrators are thinking about making Yale work better and about money and prestige issues. They are not thinking that the subject-based education that is the basis of the university structure has filtered down to high school for no good reason. They think that there is a good reason: to prepare high school students for college, namely to make the profes- sors’ lives easier when the students arrive at college. They do not know they are killing education with their subject ori- entation. But they are, just as surely as if they had a plan to do so and were working on it on a daily basis. And, the parents who just must send their kids to Yale are regularly giving them the power to continue doing just that. People who do not live and work within the confines of a great university imagine that professors are basically teachers, like high school teachers but more intellectual. They do not understand the col- lective mindset at a place like Yale, a mindset that the Yale faculty, for the most part, is perfectly happy with. They do not understand why asking what I taught was a funny question. They do not readily get, if teaching isn’t a professor’s main concern, what exactly his concerns would be. To explain all this requires looking at the life of a typical Yale fac- ulty member and beginning to understand the world in which he lives. We must begin by understanding the aims of the university it- self. Universities are employers, after all, and professors, like any other employee, worry about what their boss thinks of them. Curiously, HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023932