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High School Students Forced To Declare A Major
i_like_spam writes "As reported in the NYTimes, high school freshmen at many high schools across the nation are now being forced to pick a major. Starting this Fall, 9th graders in Florida will have to choose to major from among a set of state-approved subjects, while some students in Mississippi will have to follow one of nine designated career paths. High school administrators hope that having students declare majors will lead to greater student interest in school until graduation. College administrators think otherwise: 'youngsters should instead concentrate on developing a broad range of critical thinking and communication skills,' says Debra Humphreys from the Association of American Colleges and Universities."
To expect a child to choose a career at that age is ridiculous
You can make everyone go in the wrong direction all at once. For decades.
Deleted
On one hand, I hate the idea of anything that "pigeon holes" students.
On the other hand, I hate the concept that all students must be prepared for college. A lot of people just aren't cut out for it. Some are looking for blue collar careers, and would be better served by programs that prepare them for this vocation.
Combine this with kids who are at risk of dropping out of school. I see a lot of this. Some areas have a higher than 50% drop out rates. If you can take these kids and show them that when they are done with high school, they will be ready for a job as an electrician, a plumber or a mechanic, they'd be more likely to stay in. Tell them that they need to have 4 semesters of English, two of history, and they will be required to take some arts classes, and their reward will be two years of post-secondary trade school, and then they might get a job... well, some back grounds just don't value the education enough.
I see downsides to the "track" approach, but I see upsides as well.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
When I was in college, I had no difficulties picking a major: Computer Science. I wanted Computer Science since I played video games at the age of 3.
I had a roommate who couldn't decide on a major, and in fact didn't have one until around his Junior Year
Some people know what they want to do when they turn 14, some people don't. I do not see the value of making the people who don't pick one anyway.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
College students changes majors like they change their socks, what makes them think high school students can stick their guns?
This is not only useless, but potentially damaging to the children's careers.
As Paul Graham says,
[blockquote]If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were... there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school... In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.[/blockquote]
I highly agree with the college administrators on this one. Grade 9 is way to early to decide a career. High school is what exposes students wide range of subjects so that they can go from there. Honestly, how much does one learn about physics, chemistry, computer science, law, etc. in middle school? Certainly not enough to make a decision that will bind them to a particular field of study for the rest of their lives.
First of all, I believe you really don't know what you want to do until you get (at least) a couple of years of college under your belt. Sometimes you get lucky and guess correctly before then, but most folks just aren't mature enough or have enough life experience to be able to tell what you will enjoy doing. Yes, I understand there are exceptions to this on both ends of the spectrum; I'm talking averages here.
Second, the college folks are right on about needing a broader focus. As it is, students are too quick to dismiss fields of learning that they don't see as relevant to their interests. Sadly, most folks realize only after they leave school that the purpose of school at nearly all levels is not so much to teach you certain subjects, but to teach you how to learn.
My (Finnish equivalent to) high school focused all-round education. It was the best decision I ever made to study there. I've studied languages (Swedish, Finnish, English, French, German), the arts, philosophy, history, psychology, biology, math, physics, chemistry... The works.
And guess what? After learning the basics of pretty much everything (much at least) I'm damn sure I have a good base of general knowledge for the rest of my career, and life for that matter. When I need to pick something up I always have a place to start.
Had I been forced to focus on just a few subjects I would probably be a lot worse of in today's ever-evolving business world.
.: Max Romantschuk
The obsession with the FCATs is insane. Everything in the schools revolves around them. Some administrators in one school even "anointed" kids' desks before the test with holy oil, hoping for higher scores.
I see this as just another attempt to do that - all of the "majors" will certainly be things the FCATs focus on. This is just another way to raise artificial indicators of the success of the schools at the expense of a real education.
This space available.
Isn't it the case that other countries force their students to pick a career path beginning in high school? I thought this was how other countries, especially the Indian and Chinese government, were able to turn out so many engineers/scientists...by narrowing the focus of education early on.
I agree with the idea that students shouldn't be all lumped into the same category. If you're destined to be a scientist, why spend half your high school career studying unrelated subjects? Cram all the knowledge in now, while your brain still has a huge memory capacity. That way, college is reserved for deeper study of a subject, not review of stuff you should have learned in high school.
Also, high school curricula are pretty much aimed at the lowest common denominator. It makes sense to separate those who are interested in learning from those who are interested in using up oxygen. Ever wonder why college degrees are almost required for any corporate job? Because high school doesn't give you enough preparation to do a "real world" job. This would also prevent people from being forced through college who otherwise don't need it. There are very few non-menial jobs you can get anymore without a degree, and some people, while qualified for a job, are not suited for advanced study.
Nice job. That post took a lot of work.
My favorite part:
Really, it makes me so mad when people say "oh, he's doing a humanities degree, that's easy". I have to read *3* *books* *a* *week* on average. Not picture books either I assue you. It is a lot of work, but the upshot is improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the technical. As for those that say "you will be working at mcdonalds" , I'm going on to so a PhD in socialolgy where I'll be line for tenure where I have a much more rewarding job then beeing a science freak or an engineer.Again, congratulations.
What?
You've got to be kidding me! Is this an ad for the Sally Struther's college degree commercials? If a ninth grader is considered too young for sexual activity, which affects them for the rest of their lives, how in gods name can they be expected to know what major is right for them. Most students don't really find their way until they've gone through high school and teachers help inspire them to look towards a higer education.
/sigh GG Florida, and I went to school there, I can say this.
Isn't this similar to a communist attitude? Note I said similar, not actual communism.
In the country where Freedom is our motto, we are starting to see less and less freedoms.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
As a transplant from the UK to the US, with high school/college age kids, I think it's about time that we stopped mollycoddling and pandering to the kids here, and started getting them thinking that they cannot just drift through high school and college, they need a direction, which making a choice starts to prepare them for.
When I was at school in the UK in the early 1980's, at age 14 we had to narrow our courses to about eight subjects in total (English, Maths and a couple of others mandatory, leaving quite a bit of choice) and we studied for national exams ("O" levels) at age 16. We then chose three or four subjects usually from the eight, to take to an advanced level ("A" level), leading to national exams at the age of 18. When it cam to university time, there was no such thing as this "undeclared major" rubbish that my son is doing at an American university starting this fall. Our university admission was into a particular course, based on prerequisite courses at "A" level at required grades. This allowed the universities to know the minimum level and rely on the expected knowledge of all the students in a given course, and there was no need for foundation years, or spending the first term or two catching everyone up. This is why we could have three year Bachelor's courses instead of the four year ones here in the US.
Today's kids are not being properly prepared for the work environment. I've lost count of the number of confident, self assured, broadly educated US Bachelors or Masters graduates I have interviewed for jobs in electronics who don't understand Ohm's Law or basic op-amp theory after graduating from between four and six years of study. It's time to stop the madness, and start preparing the kids for the new world, where they are competing against low wage earning graduates based in India or China, and if you think the UK system was harsh in making people choose, you should see the focus and emphasis on academics and career preparation in Asia...
Many accidently selected Pat Buchanan as their major.
You guys all assume that this is for the kids going to college. There are a LOT of high schoolers (even in Florida, where college is practically free) who will never go to college. They will barely graduate high school (because they don't care), never leave their hometown, and will make less than $15/hr for the rest of their life. This program is for them. Everyone on here talks about "that would never work for me" and that's because 90% of Slashdot folks went to college. Not only that, but are -smart- geeks. I think that if these kids pick a "major" with the intent of going to college later, that won't pigeon hole them. I had to pick one as soon as I enrolled at UF, but they told me it didn't really matter. For the kids NOT going to college, I think it will be beneficial.
What business wants is trained workers. Not educated people. They want people whose education is narrowed down to the point where they are useful for the company, while at the same time limiting them to whatever is useful for the company. This has many advantages for them. First of all, a focused education can be much deeper than a broad education. Meaning, the person will have a better understanding of his focus. And second, the person can hardly switch jobs. If you are an expert mechanic for Toyota but know little if anything about anything else, you cannot simply quit and move to a different job. You are pressed into your job with no room to move.
Worse yet, you have to swallow whatever is said about anything that's not in your field of expertise. You have to believe what you don't know. Sure, you will get irate and call bullshit on everything spewed on the media about the things you do understand, but you will readily believe everything else.
And that's what is wanted. It's also a very convenient way for Government out of its dilemma: You need dumb people to govern them easily, but smart people to have a strong economy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Copy/paste troll, complete with spelling errors.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Because in my experience, China's educational system sucks.
Having talked to people who've gone and taught there (actual teachers, not regular Joes called in to play teacher) they say it is all route memorization. To be smart is to have a lot of facts and formulas in your head. Well as it turns out memorization and analyzation are really only useful to a point. That makes you good at taking tests, but you need to be able to synthesize that knowledge in to what else you know, and apply it to novel problems to really be useful. What more for some subjects it just totally and utterly fails. Language would be a good example. They teach foreign language the same way: memorize hundreds of phrases a week. However one needs only to examine the way you use your native language to realise that's not how we process it.
I then get to see the results of this education where I work, which is an engineering department at a university. What I see, fails to impress. The language skills of a large number of our Chinese students are ATROCIOUS. I've no idea how they passed the entrance exam (actually I do know, it is because memorization will do good for that, just not for the real world). They have extreme difficulty expressing themselves and almost as much difficulty understanding native speakers, even for quite simple things. They get along primarily by joining labs of professors that speak their native language, and simply isolating themselves. We have students who've been here for 4 years, yet still struggle, when a year of immersion is usually enough for extreme proficiency if you apply yourself.
Likewise I find in general they are extremely poor problem solvers. They've little trouble with book work or tests, however they are sunk when it comes to a practical problem. A lab full of people allegedly getting degrees in networking will be befuddled by a simple subnetting problem (they had their default gateway set outside of the subnet and didn't see the problem). They have knowledge, but it seems not understanding. If a problem isn't phrased in the theoretical terms and abstract equations they learned, they can't solve it.
Based on my experiences with these students, who are supposed to be very good since they can come to a foreign university, and with students from the US and other countries, along with what I've learned of China's educational system, I don't think I'd hold it up as the model to follow. It does seem to do well at preparing people for taking standardised tests, but alas the world isn't composed of those. It's the ability to use all that information on problems in the real world that is truly useful.
So I disagree that a better educational system is one that's more hardcore, one that forces kids to concentrate on only one thing at a very early age. I think a better educational system is one that tries to generally educate the mind, one that teaches people how to think, how to solve problems, and gives them a set of tools to do that for many different ones. Then, later, if they are interested in a field that requires more specialized knowledge, they can get that specialized training.
One of our professors has a quote I like very much:
BS: To learn how to think.
MS: To think about what others have thought.
PhD: To boldly think where none have thought before.
I think there's some truth to that. An undergraduate degree (and ESPICALLY a high school education) shouldn't be to try an hyper focus. It should be to teach you how to be a better thinker, to give you more skills and tools to that end. Yes there should be some focus since the skills for engineering are not the same skills for linguistics, but not a hyper focused program. That comes at a masters level, should you want it, where you really focus on one area of research.
For more on this, you might want to read Richard Feynman's biography (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman). In it he talks about his experience in Brazil. He found that they really emphasised science in schools, teaching elementary kids
It's not sufficient to say "country x is sucessful", when you're trying to prove a policy used by x is good. First you need to prove that the country will be sucessful if and only if the policy is good.
Technically this is a strong form of the "missing midle term" error in logic (;-))
Alternatively, since Ontario isn't leading the world in economic success, and did use that policy, it's necessarily true that the policy doesn't gurantee economic success (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Some of us were blessed in that we knew what we wanted to do early in high school. I was one of those, I loved computers and took business courses until grade 13. I also took welding, machine shop, shop for small engines (marine, snowmobile etc), physics, biology and chemistry, typing along with the all of the math, geography, history and english courses. I had a very well rounded education so that if I did change my mind I had the education to change careers totally. Those skills are still used today as I can weld/braze things, I can use machinery to make metal items and tools and I can strip and rebuild small engines with my eyes shut. When people ask me what I do for a living it sometimes freaks them out that a 'computer geek' can hold a welding torch without burning down the building.
When our children leave high school they should know
Panic now, beat the rush!
We have/had something similar here, except more broad. There were 3 tracks:
1) Advanced - Going to University
2) General - Going to community college
3) Basic - I like soup
That was in the mid/late 90s and they've since made the names a little more "PC". Each was geared to get the student what they needed for after highschool, without pigeonholing them into a specific field. Also, it was on a course by course basis so that people weak in certain areas but strong in others could tailor their classes along those lines.
It's a good system, except that because students who should have been in basic math wanted to be in general and general in advanced they would dumb down classes. All because teachers/councilors didn't have the balls to tell students, "You really should be in general/basic." So the students who should be there suffer from the progress being held back. This has rolled over into the community colleges where we have students entering Journalism who don't have a basic grasp of the English language and students entering Computer Programming who've never turned on a computer. Again they lower the bar so that people's feelings don't get hurt, and the people who really should be there suffer for it.
Sorry for the slight tangent. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
NCLB is designed obscure the truth about education in America with gimmicks. I was a statistical analyst in charge of producing NCLB reports for the state of CT. The NCLB regulations and reporting were the reason I left the education field altogether. The statistics are both unsound and completely incorrect given the sample base and intent.
i ew/fl.doc Link to the doc quoted above, from the US Department of Education. Every state has to submit hundreds of narrative documents like this every year in order to qualify for funding.
Here are the major issues with education right now in Florida (and most states):
1. There is a significant achievement gap between high/low poverty schools and white/minority schools. That gap has increased due to NCLB.
2. Highly Qalified Teachers: There aren't enough. Another component of NCLB requires schools to move toward 100% highly qualified staff. The gap here is the same as the achievement gap. The rich/white schools get better teachers.
To quote a report by the Florida Department of Education to the feds regarding their progress toward "HQT = 100%":
"The percentage of classes taught by HQTs is above 90 percent in all categories except high-poverty secondary schools. At the secondary level, there is a six percentage point gap between high- and low-poverty schools."
http://www.ed.gov/programs/teacherqual/hqtltr/rev
Teach teachers how to teach. Make parents responsible for their children.
--Always, I mean never..., No I mean always check your references.--
Remember those tests you would fill out with a bunch of random questions and then you would end up with a bunch of potential "best fit" jobs? If I remember right, my two top jobs were something like rocket scientist and garbage man. I'm glad I wasn't made to decide that day what my future was... I managed to take the middle road and become a EE.
Don't rate this insightful. It's a logical fallacy.
"Some schools with lots of resources are badly managed. Therefore, spending money to create better schools a bad idea."
The truth is that most schools with lots of funding produce students with higher GPA's. In general, more funding is a good thing.
Um, where's the hard sciences? Where's the math-heavy subjects (including CS)? What is something as narrow as sports management doing in that list? WTF is "international studies" anyway?
When I was in school I took shop one year (it was actually required for all students) What I learned was that I could solder OK with a torch (I already could solder with an iron), could do a halfway-decent welding job with acetylene, but don't let me near an arc welder unless you want metal with ragged holes in it. Certainly it was more relevant to my future than Freshman English (a class taught by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing -- and I did not learn that line in that class), and more interesting as well. If these majors are so all-inclusive as to lock students into a single track with no opportunity to try other things, it'll make high school an even worse grind than it already is.
Anyway, I know people about my own age (mid-thirties) who had a major in high school. It seems to be a fad some schools go through from time to time. Actual practical effect is likely negligible, at least for college-bound students.
I haven't read the rest of the comments yet and I'm sure something to this effect has already been said, but I recall pretty vividly being frustrated and bored by how aimless my education had gotten by the end of high school. My senior year, I suddenly found myself in an AP Calculus class which I had positively no interest in but had somehow ascended to by way of being pretty good at Algebra four years ago. I resolved to not learn Calculus under any circumstances, and eventually my guidance counselor called me into her office in mid-semester to inform me that they were just going to drop the class for me (long past the official course drop deadline) and I, cheerfully taking the whole thing to be a joke I'd gotten the better of at this point, agreed. A year later, I was roughly as frustrated with these "gen eds" I found myself stuck with, even as I naturally had no idea what I felt like studying. I'd just as soon call myself a pretty extreme example - and god knows the schools are trying hard enough to push college acceptance as the most important thing in the history of mankind for your average seventeen-year-old student (which I can reasonably say might as well be now that I'm no longer actively having to call the whole thing a crock on a day-to-day basis to maintain my high-school-dignity) - but this is a decent enough sign that things need to change. Problem is, of course, that I would never in a million years think a ninth-grader capable of making that kind of decision. (I ended up doubling in Cognitive Science and Film as an undergrad, at a university that had neither department. The degree is, quite fittingly, useless.)
The earlier students choose a major the better. Get them used to the whole cycle of repeatedly switching majors like proper college students.
This can be great for some students. If they're like myself and found the general material offered in high school so incredibly boring that they couldn't be bothered to put forth any effort. I know if there had been some sort of program gearing me towards something I was interested in, say Electrical Engineering, I would have actually put some effort into high school.
That being said as people have pointed out this can be a burden on kids who just don't know or don't have any interests compelling enough to work towards.
I know right after I finished school, New York State started offering a program where you chose a field you were interested in and the program would prepare you better for majoring in that subject when you went to university.
It's definitely a double edged sword. It can be great for kids who are bored and would like something interesting to work on, but terrible for those who are already struggling just to pass the general courses.
This is ridiculous; almost to the point of being criminally negligent.
I agree and am always saying that one of the many, many major problems with education in America is that kids are not taught to think critically, to think for themselves.
They are taught to learn by rote and not to question authority.
With how the publication of science and textbooks has been politicized and corrupted; and then this crap and everything else that is going on with education here, it is clear that the goal is to create more cogs.
More cogs for the the machine that will be good little citizens. More bricks in the wall; like the Pink Floyd song "Another Brick in the Wall, pt.2"
More and more I am so sad for this country because I just don't see a way for America to survive as a free, progressive society. We were once the light of democracy for the world supposedly - and now , if we can avoid becoming a complete fascist dictatorship - we'll still have to deal with a country full of mindless cogs.
Politically he'd never get anywhere and be corned off by the fat cat's, I have several family members who teach and it's all the about time served and who you know. We're talking about a system where gym teachers who do almost nothing make the same as the AP Physics/Chem/Math teachers make, sometime more, bc with all their free time not grading anything tangible they can coach multiple sports... it's very unfortunate our system. First thing that needs to happen is to break the teachers union...
My children will be going to the best private school my wife and I can finance for this very reason... F no child left behind too.
I'm a college freshmen in louisiana and we had to do this all through highschool. But it was more of a "okay class, the state says you have to fill out these forms, otherwise you won't be able to completely ignore them properly." We had to choose a track, but nobody took them seriously, I don't think the guidance counselors even looked at them when they were scheduling classes. Rufus
In the begining there was nothing. And then God said, "Let there be light!" And there was still nothing, but at least yo
If the title of the /. article had read: "HS Students Allowed to Specialize", would there have been this uproar?
Um... no I suppose if the title was wrong there wouldn't be an uproar. Allowed != Forced It's pretty basic. The rest of your comments are equally wrong.
* There are four main ways to improve an economy; specialization is one of them. That's what we're discussing here. Have you noticed that we haven't seen any Mozart's or Chaplin's lately? Given any thought as to why? They essentially _majored_ in their field at an early age and stayed with it! Where in the US will you find an educational system that will allow specialization at an early age? Home school. That's it. Until this plan came along. I'm not claiming it's perfect, but specialization isn't the Big Bad Wolf.
There are lots of ways of improving an economy, many of which are socially damaging or outright immoral. If they work (and I still question this way would) it doesn't change the fact that they're wrong. As for Mozart, etc. your argument is speculative at best, seeing as Mozart was composing by age 5, which is BEFORE we put children in kindergarten. Mozart was special beyond his education, he was a savant.
*I suspect that most of you how have responded negatively haven't taught high school or college, ever. We have high schools that turn out students who need Basic and Intermediate Algebra and sometimes Remedial Composition I _and_ II in college. Something must change in public school systems. At least if an older student can pursue something s/he finds relevant, there would be initiative to pursue quality work. That might help a the students who recognize that public school is a jail from which they can't escape until they turn 18.
I had a hard time with this "point" because it talks about a lot of fairly different things, yet draws no conclusion. Needless to say I think it's not important for people to have taught high school in order to have an opinion about high school, seeing as most of us have been through it, and remember it. The rest doesn't actually seem to say anything about specialization at all.
*As for the 'let the kids be kids!' argument: crap. They demand to be treated like adults when it comes to sex, alcohol, drugs, and the use of a parent's car. But when they enter the school, they want Mommy and Daddy to threaten a lawsuit if their homework becomes "too hard". As others have posted, we're facing fierce competition in India and Asia from hyper-educated grads who are willing to work for $1/hour. It's time to throw out the idea of a leisurely stroll through K-12 or K-BS.
This is a straw man argument. We can let kids be kids, or not, and specialize, or not. The 2 don't necessarily affect each other. And if I had a 13 year old (the age we're talking about starting specializing at) having sex, drinking, doing drugs, and using my car, I think there would be bigger problems than what they took in school. And the "hyper-educated" foreign workforce doesn't have anything to do with specialization either.
*Re: 'They don't know what they want to do yet!' Do they want to eat? Do they want to be able to move out of Mommy and Daddy's house and live on their own? If so, they need money. If they can't inherit it, they'll have to work for it. That requires a job. A job requires training. They may not like it, but I won't pay for their Welfare checks just because they couldn't find the inspiration to be a fill-in-the-blank.
Fact: people need to work for money(Unless they inherit it/whatever). Fact: you need to be trained for any job, no matter how simple. How does this mean someone in grade 9 needs to know what they want to be when they grow up?
*And if they don't know what they want to do yet, then we, the adults, with scars on our bodies from what Life was done to us, have the right to choose for them. They're not adults yet. If they were, they'd pay taxes and have
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
I went to a technical high school where we had to declare a major and would concentrate our study on that area for our last 3 years. My major was commercial art. When I got to college, I wasn't required to continue in that area, but I did.
So of course now my career is in computer programming.
-- Boycott Shell
I graduated high school in 1985. I remember having to select a path my sophomore year. I chose the "Academic" path which allowed me to take Honors and AP courses. I was no longer eligible to take some other classes like shop. I figured this was the better way to go.
Today, I earn $50K as a developer. I should have gone the "vocational" route and taken shop. I could have become a housing developer and made millions the last decade.
Thanks for guiding me down the right path high school!
Most kids in my school thought of it as a baby sitting service, not a place of education.
Want kids to be interested in school? Give them an actual reason to do well.
Let them leave once they have achieved a minimum level of competence in the core subjects.
My guess is that about half the students (the half that currently do not go on to college) would work pretty hard at learning the subjects if they knew that once they had mastered them, they would no longer be subject to the school system.
Then set up a decent secondary education system, for all those that decide that they need more education, after they've had a taste of the real world.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
The central point of Huxley's "Brave New World" was making human development into an assembly line process. While we're not yet conditioning embryos, I don't think we need to force career paths on 9th graders. As others have mentioned here, this is the method used by China and India to pump out engineers and doctors. The trouble is, passion for the physical sciences can be an important factor of a good engineer, and while India and China certainly have some good engineers, they have to get them by making a lot of them and culling out the bad ones. I don't want to live in a society where 75% of the population is thrown into a career they hate just to put the nation on the fast track to scientific progress with as little educational investment as possible. Instead, why don't we use all of our wonderful science--extended life times and better agricultural processes--on lengthening the possible path of education, so that students have time to get a larger sampling of human knowledge before they are required to move on. I thought it worth mentioning that I currently work in a Physics research lab, and many of the skills I use most often were learned working residential construction and low-level IT jobs in High School. Granted, I'm just an undergraduate so I'm doing more helpful lab work than actual research, but Grad students and even Professors occasionally have to fabricate their own lab equipment, too.