I should have been homeschooled

Guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf links to a post by Alan Jacobs at The American Scene in which Jacobs ponders his homeschooled son's literature curriculum. Money quote:

He’s headed into the eleventh grade, and while his education so far has given him a sound overview of Western cultural history, we’re concerned that he hasn’t had enough experience digging deeply into particular issues, doing wide-ranging research and coming up with sophisticated theses based on what he has learned. So we’ve decided to organize the coming school year around particular topics with interdisciplinary facets to them, starting in each case with one or two books that will in different ways orient him to the issues. Our focus will be on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West, though any non-Western topics could reach back farther.

Friedersdorf marvels at the quality of the young scholar's education and laments his own. His comments are worth quoting in full:

I say that as someone who attended a well-regarded Catholic high school that offered numerous AP classes, better than average teachers and a reputation among elite colleges for turning out exceptionally well prepared students. Even so, I cannot help but assess its curriculum with a Paul Simon line: "When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." Despite hard work that resulted in a 4.0+ GPA, I spent four years studying Spanish without becoming anything near fluent, passed an AP Physics class knowing embarrassingly little about the subject, and endured a biology class that basically amounted to memorizing terms long enough to pass successive unit exams (and no longer), conceptual understanding be damned. The only classes that afforded real learning were senior year English, modern art, geometry, and an ethics course, classes I remain grateful for having taken -- they've afforded more intellectual fulfillment in subsequent years than anything in my upbringing save the fact that my parents read to me endlessly as a little kid.

What strikes me, all these years later, about my lousy but better-than-average high school education is how useful it proved in preparing me for college and the job market. Absent exceptional teachers, an academically competitive high school basically teaches the young how to game the system lots of people call the American meritocracy. It is difficult to describe this skill set precisely, though it certainly includes things like earning good grades in classes you know little if anything about, learning to game standardized tests and exams, employing writerly tricks to obscure the fact that you know nothing of substance about the topic of your five page paper, and understanding which teachers aren't desirous of substance insomuch as they want an ability to fake it on pages where the margins and font are diligently set to their specifications.

Oh to have those youthful years back. As an adult, I understand the preciousness of time, and I sorely regret having wasted any of it simulating rather than gaining knowledge. The experience does inform a suspicion that if we stopped making the overlap between academic skills and life skills a self-fulfilling prophecy, they might overlap less than we imagine. Were that the case, perhaps high schools would rejigger their curriculum to more closely resemble what Alan is attempting: knowledge as something more than a metric to be measured by standardized tests, a means of admission to a selective college or a prerequisite for strategic advancement in the American job market.

He could not have described my experience any better. I too went to an above average high school (although mine was public), populated by high quality teachers, ample resources and plenty of AP courses. I too spent four years studying Spanish only to achieve mild proficiency, managed to earn a G.P.A. of 3.9, and stumbled my way to A's in chemistry and physics without retaining much of anything. With the exception of AP English, an excellent Vietnam War class, an Introduction to Journalism course, and a fantastic AP Calculus teacher, my high school experience would have been utterly forgettable in terms of content literacy. But I definitely learned the art of B.S.ing on papers, rote memorization without any long term memory retention, and the importance of presentation over substance.

And yet, I was one of the lucky ones. Transitioning to college was challenging but not overwhelmingly so and I adjusted to the increased workload and higher expectations rather seamlessly. I can hardly imagine the difficulty less advantaged students faced, if they had the opportunity to go to college at all.

One of the first friends I made freshmen year was homeschooled and I remember wondering how she could have possibly been prepared for college without attending an actual high school. But she had a depth of knowledge that made my educational background look mediocre at best and I realized pretty quickly that the conventional wisdom was wrong. The one-on-one instruction of the homeschooling environment, free from the restrictions of standardized tests, allows for the kind of meaningful learning that Wes Jacobs has access to and even the best high school in America cannot compete with that. It makes me wonder just what we as educators can do to provide an environment that does encourage genuine exploration and critical thinking, even as we plan for the next round of assessments.