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Restructuring the University 169
As it stands now, we can’t. High schools teach what colleges tell
them to teach. Recently I was looking for a picture of the man who
was principal of my elementary school many years ago. I wanted to
put it in a speech I was about to give. So, I went to the P.S. 247 (Brook-
lyn) website and discovered that it is now a “New York City College
Partnership Elementary School.” When I finished laughing, I started
to wonder when this “everyone must spend their entire childhood
worrying about getting into college” nonsense would end. P.S. 247
was not a great bastion of learning or a fun place in the 1950s, and I
can only imagine how awful it is now. I wondered why P.S. 247 now
had to be a college prep elementary school. A commenter on what I
wrote noted that the old trade schools, which used to dominate the
New York school system, were serving mostly minority populations
and this had to stop; so now “everyone can go to college” is the man-
tra of the equity folks.
But the problem is, of course, that what is being bought with all
this college preparation is the right to be an unemployed English ma-
jor instead of the airplane mechanic you might have been if you had
gone to Aviation High School.
High school has become all about college, and college is all about
scholarship and research, so what is left? So who teaches students to
think clearly? Who teaches students about the possibilities there are
for work that might interest them? Who teaches students how to get
along with one another, and who teaches people how to communi-
cate well?
Certainly not the high schools, which are obsessed with test score
preparation, which means rote memory for the most part.
Certainly not the colleges, which are run by faculty who do re-
search and who think mostly about that.
One possible answer is community colleges, but when someone
like me suggests that skipping college and going to community college
instead to learn an actual skill might be a good idea for most students,
that suggestion is disregarded as being on the lunatic fringe.
The good news is that because of all this craziness, there is a big
opportunity to build an alternative, which I will discuss in Chapter 14.
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