The School Revolution (13 page)

In today’s world, mathematics is becoming ever more important. The use of statistical techniques in the social sciences and history has increased dramatically over the last forty years. Students who do not do well in mathematics are penalized. Yet mathematics instruction at the high
school level is usually haphazard. There will be only a few teachers who are very good, and who can motivate students to do much better in math than most of us did when we were in high school, but what we need is a systematic program of mathematics development. We have an example of this already online: the Khan Academy. It is free of charge. Any homeschooler can use these lessons to improve his
ability in mathematics. Not to use them seems silly. Some public schools are beginning to use this website to help their students improve in mathematics.

Students should go at their own pace. In some courses, they are very skilled; they race ahead. No classroom of slower students should hold them back. In other courses, they take longer. They should be able
to review lessons. If it takes three viewings of a video, or three readings of a document, so what? They should keep reviewing until they master the material.

Students must learn very early to be competitive. This comes a long time before high school. The problem with public schools in recent years is that they emphasize self-esteem, but not self-esteem based on performance. Theories
of self-esteem that are not based on objective performance in a competitive environment are self-defeating. The student begins to think he is competent when in fact he is barely functional, and may actually be incompetent. We hear these horror stories all the time. A student graduates as valedictorian of his high school class, but when he gets to college, he flunks out. He did not have the skills
he was led to believe he possessed. So, it is important for any school environment to offer opportunities for students to master the material in a competitive environment. This does not necessarily mean the student has to be given grades. What it does mean is that he is able to compare his output with the output of his fellow students. This is another reason, with my curriculum, we require students
to produce YouTube videos and start a WordPress account. Students can then see how they are doing in comparison with other students in the same program. They can also learn from the skilled performers, whether the skills involve technical knowledge or simply personal abilities that have been improved by years of self-expression.

I believe in good teaching, but
I believe that teaching should be in the form of tutorials. I think the best people to teach students are other students. Students who serve as tutors to other students improve their own skills of communication. They become far more proficient in whatever subject they are teaching. At the same time, other students can get the information they need from students who may be only a year ahead of them.
The students who are being taught are being taught by people for whom the learning experience is still fresh in their minds. There is also the problem that the world has only a limited supply of really good teachers. This is why the use of course-specific teaching forums is important. One student may not be able to communicate the information in such a way that the struggling student is helped
very much. But if two or three students answer the same question, and provide an effective teaching video to demonstrate a solution to the student’s problem, the struggling student is more likely to understand.

I think it is best that students learn on their own. Self-teaching is the best way to learn anything. But there are times when we hit brick walls. At that point, it is better
to be taught by someone who has previously hit that same brick wall, and who remembers how he got over it, around it, through it, or under it. It is best to be taught by someone who remembers how he went about solving the problem. This is why my curriculum relies heavily on student interaction as a means of providing specialized tutorials for students who hit brick walls.

Any curriculum that does not provide all these benefits is a substandard one. Students in a traditional tax-funded school may pick up bits and pieces of what I have described here, but not all these techniques are provided in a systematic fashion. I think any student who reads this list is capable of understanding the benefits involved. Once the student understands
the benefits, he is far more likely to pursue this course of study with more real enthusiasm than he would if placed in an environment in which these techniques were not taught on a systematic basis.

I have covered this before, but it is so vital that I have decided to repeat the message. Some students would like a lot of individual attention.
This makes them dependent on their teachers. Other students want to gain mastery on their own. I think the latter is the correct approach. I do not think it is a good idea for students to become excessively dependent on salaried teachers, meaning live teachers in a classroom.
The older the student is, the less he should become dependent upon teachers in a classroom
. Perhaps for certain kinds of
scientific studies, in which laboratory assignments are crucial, he needs the presence of a technician. A course like this can be taken in a summer school program at a community college or immediately after high school graduation. The point is, the more the high school educational program is self-taught, the sooner the student learns the basics of academic success in upper-division work in college.
The closer someone gets to the final stage of the PhD program, the less dependent he is on any teacher’s intervention. The brighter a student is, and the more self-disciplined, the less he should be dependent upon classroom teachers. If he needs help, he ought to get it from other students who are a little bit better in the particular course than he is.

Parents of high school
students seem to believe that they are doing the students a favor by enrolling them in small classes in which there are very few students per teacher. This creates a sense of dependency in the academic work of the student. This dependency will disappear overnight when the student walks onto a college campus. Why parents should think that it is a good idea to have students become dependent upon
the personal intervention of a teacher in a classroom is beyond me. The student who is advancing educationally should require less and less intervention by classroom teachers.

The tendency is for students to take advantage of any free ride that they can get. This is the tendency of anybody. This is why it is dangerous to have small classes in high school. It creates a sense of dependency
that will weaken the student’s ability to compete in college. To enroll a student into a class with a low student-teacher ratio is a real disservice to the student. The student walks onto a college campus and enrolls in a course were there may be as many as 1,000 students listening to a professor lecture. I mentioned this is the previous chapter. These are called mega classes, and they are cash
cows for colleges. The course probably is broken up into discussion groups of about 30 students, which are monitored by graduate students with no teaching experience. Nothing prepares a high school senior for this kind of transition. It is one of the reasons why half of all college freshmen do not graduate.

There are probably high school or even college graduates reading this who would
like to have some of these skills. There is no reason you could not sign up for the course on goal-setting, time management, and study habits. It’s never too late.

W
hat colleges want when they admit a freshman is almost the opposite of what parents want their children to be at the time of high school graduation. This has always been true, because what colleges want is a compliant student whose thinking can be reworked by the faculty. Colleges want to break a student’s
confidence in the moral, religious, and political outlook of parents rich enough to send their children to college to be brainwashed by a usually liberal faculty. This has been going on for a long time. Aristophanes wrote a comedy about it 2,300 years ago:
The Clouds
.

A college admissions office looks at such things as high school grades, extracurricular activities, and, above
all, the SAT or ACT score. The SAT or ACT score lets the admissions office compare the performance of many applicants. The admissions office does not want to let anybody into the program who is likely to flunk out. It wants the highest score it can get, but at the same time, admissions officers know that the very best students are likely to go to a better college.

There is great competition
for good students, but mostly it is competition for money from their parents and from the state legislature. Colleges are in a major financial bind. This is going to get a great deal worse, because, as I’ve mentioned, it is now possible for students to graduate from an accredited university for about $15,000 or less. Most tax-funded universities cost at least $15,000 a year: tuition, room,
board, and textbooks. Some private universities cost three or four times this much. So when parents finally figure out that they do not have to dip into their retirement savings portfolio in order to send one child through college, let alone three, competition for students is going to increase.

Colleges want to get students enrolled as freshmen
because this is where they make most of their money. It costs relatively little to teach freshmen or sophomores, yet the tuition payment is the same as for upper-division years. (The upper division is where the student majors in a particular subject. This is where he gets taught by PhD-holding professors rather than graduate assistants who have never had any training in teaching. The payoff in
education for the student is in the upper division.) Therefore, colleges do their best to persuade parents and students that it is necessary to spend the first two years on campus. It is not necessary, either economically or academically. But it is not in the self-interest of colleges that families understand this.

It is a matter of public record that the first two years of college
impart almost no information to students.
There is no improvement in student performance for the freshman and sophomore years in college
.
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This is an enormous failure on the part of colleges, but parents seem unaware of what statisticians have discovered. So do most students, who are victims of this system. Students unknowingly waste precious time, and their parents pay very high prices, when
the first two years of college can be completed during high school, by means of CLEP exams and DSST exams, and for a total cost of about $2,000. The student can live at home, complete high school through online education, get a part-time job locally, pass the CLEP or DSST exams by using used, inexpensive older editions of college-level textbooks, and enter college as a junior. Most colleges hate
this strategy, but this is the new reality. It is their problem, not the parents’.

Therefore, what we find is that parental interests and collegiate interests are opposed to each other. The only reason that parents consent to the traditional college scenario is that they do not know there are alternatives, not just at the
college level, but also at the high school level. The student does not have to go through a lockstep program of high school classroom instruction in order to get into a good college. Furthermore, because most students do not seek entrance into the top four dozen schools, the degrees they earn do not enable them to get any particular advantage in the marketplace. As long as a student has a bachelor’s
degree from an accredited college or university, his degree is worth approximately as much as any comparable degree from the vast majority of American colleges.

These days, a degree is not worth a great deal of money anyway. Over half of all students with college degrees wind up in jobs that do not require a college degree. Ever since 2008, the job market for college graduates has been
a disaster. If a student has not majored in something such as petroleum engineering or another engineering degree, he is likely to wind up in a low-paying job whose requirements have nothing to do with his college major. Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University, offered this assessment in 2010: “Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or
professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000
parking lot attendants
[italics in the original]. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.”
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Colleges want bright students who already accept
the basic outlook of the liberal arts faculty, which is politically liberal. They want students who can write well, think clearly, and parrot the party line of the classroom. In other words, they want intelligent students who conform to the outlook of the faculty.

Colleges want to deal with students who require no time outside the classroom. These students learn rapidly, pass their
exams with high grades, and offer no challenge to the professor’s views. Most important, their parents’ checks never bounce. It is becoming more difficult to find students like these.

A growing number of colleges are therefore accepting students with homeschooling backgrounds rather than the standard classroom schooling dominant in the public
schools and in most private schools. (That procedure produces students who are predictable, but not self-motivated, creative, or ready for upper-division work.). If the student has scored well on his SAT or ACT exam, or, even better from the point of view of the parents, has passed enough CLEP exams to let him enter as a sophomore or junior, he is going to get admission to most colleges. (Some
colleges will not accept CLEP exams, precisely because the colleges make so much money in parking with virtually no education to students during the first two years. These students are seen as cash cows.) But competition is increasing, and enough colleges accept CLEP exams, so that those that do not are facing serious problems with recruiting. These problems are going to increase.

Students who received their education in a homeschool environment perform above average, and are well-prepared for college-level work. Colleges want the tuition checks from the parents, so they grant admission to these nontraditional students. The problem for the faculty members is that these students tend not to be conformists. They are more likely to have been trained with a set of presuppositions
in opposition to those of the typical liberal arts college professor. Professors find it difficult to persuade students trained in a homeschool environment to change their views. The students are not impressed by classroom instruction. They have not been subjected to it. Their examination papers do not reflect the prevailing outlook of the public school curriculum. They have gained their educations
outside the bureaucratic, textbook-based environment of the typical public school. But professors are usually happy to teach above-average students, even when those students do not share their views. There are so few students who show any degree of creativity or independent thought that college professors are usually overjoyed to have anybody in class who pays attention to what they say, even
though the student may not agree with them.

I do not think it is a good idea to send students into a classroom environment in which their views are going to be discriminated against. There are better ways for students to get college degrees that do not require them to go through the ideological meat grinder represented by the typical liberal arts college. Students in upper-division
courses are less likely to be pressured by faculty members, because those faculty members assume that the screening was done during the first two years of college. They assume that the students have already accepted the party line of higher education, so they are not as apt to be actively hostile to students who do not accept the party line. If a student can get into school as a junior, it is to his
and the family’s advantage.

There is some agreement between parents and colleges regarding the benefits of the student capable of performing college-level work. Colleges do not want to expel students. They do not want to waste their time teaching students who will not be able to graduate. If a student enters college capable of performing in
a collegiate setting, the parents are happy and the college is happy. Student performance is the most important single criterion of success, and both parents and college authorities agree on this point.

Colleges do not provide much assistance to students who are not self-motivated. If a student has been nagged by his parents and his teachers to hand his work in on time, he is going
to be in trouble when he hits college. There is nobody at college to nag him—unless he is a star athlete in an athletic scholarship program. A student who has survived high school only because he was nagged is not in a good position to survive on a college campus. Very few homeschooled students need this kind of nagging.

Colleges want bright
students who accept the outlook of the liberal arts faculty. They also want parents to send checks that do not bounce. As competition has increased for these students, colleges have accepted more homeschooled students. If the students have passed the SAT or ACT with high marks, the colleges welcome them. There is no discrimination against homeschooled students who pass the entrance exams with good
marks.