Curriculum Upgrade Plan Merits Support
It is natural in the course of a lifetime for a person’s options to become narrowed as opportunities seized or missed and paths chosen or rejected inevitably shape our lives in later years. Ideally, this is a gradual process, and the important choices each person faces are made with the most mature judgment that can be brought to bear.
Some of these decisions must be made in high school, and San Diego City School Board Members Dorothy Smith and Jim Roache are concerned that too many youngsters are selling themselves short by making poor choices that will constrict their future career opportunities and intellectual development.
Roache and Smith have proposed an upgrading of the curriculum most high school students take so that courses historically considered to be “college preparatory” are routinely taken by the vast majority of students. In essence, they have called for an infusion of more substance into the high school experience.
The two board members are relying on a philosophy that students will perform better when more is expected of them and when they are given interesting material and imaginative instruction.
Those who question this approach fear that if standards are uniformly raised, some students will simply be unable to handle the higher expectations and will be left behind or, worse, drop out. The school board is scheduled to take up the proposal this Wednesday.
The Smith-Roache plan has been attacked in some quarters as being elitist. Some teachers and students question why the same standards college-bound students must meet should be imposed on those students who do not intend to go to college. Many students don’t see how tougher courses in English, math or social studies are “relevant to their careers.”
In reality, however, the proposal is anti-elitist. Its purpose is to see that all students learn to achieve at their maximum ability level. Nothing could be more egalitarian than the belief that one does not have to attend college to benefit from the ability to read and enjoy literature or to profit from the reasoning skills developed studying algebra or geometry.
Unfortunately, many bright high school students are making decisions that will not only foreclose any chance of going to college, but also waste the opportunity to develop their minds to their fullest potential. In a kind of pre-yuppie syndrome, some high school students elect to take easy courses so that they can hold down part-time jobs and earn money for gas, clothes and other material goods. Ironically, these students do not seem to realize that the initiative they show by going to work early may actually come at the expense of developing the skills they will need later to support an expensive life style as an adult.
These teen-agers have not yet learned that most of us cannot predict today what we will want or what will satisfy us years from now. Neither do they understand how rapidly the job market is changing and that they would be well advised to acquire the broadest possible range of knowledge, regardless of what kinds of jobs they aspire to.
The only caveat we offer the school board is that the plan should be fashioned in such a way that parents, counselors and teachers retain the flexibility to place students who legitimately cannot do more difficult work in classes that are appropriate for them. But with that in mind, the board should embrace this proposal as a fulfillment of its responsibility to prepare young people to function in an ever-changing world, to enjoy their intellectual gifts and to become good citizens.
