First High School, Then College

There are a couple of interesting things going on with respect to politicians and colleges these days. Many politicians say everyone or almost everyone should go to college to be able to compete in the global, high tech world of the 21^st Century, or something like that.  They also say colleges should be judged and held accountable on the basis of their rates of graduation, the percentage of enrolling students who get degrees.  A great many people lack the ability or the commitment or both to do college level work, and no politician can change that fact by legislation, executive order or his supposed inspirational qualities.  So if governments get serious about almost everybody going to college and very high percentages of enrollees graduating, colleges will have only one way to meet their demands. They will have to lower their standards and requirements for a degree drastically .

This has already happened in the schools. Before World War II, many schools had serious graduation ceremonies for students completing the eighth grade. There were at least two good reasons for doing so. First, many people’s schooling ended after the eighth grade. Second finishing the eighth grade was an accomplishment and indicated a person doing so could read, write, and perform calculations and had been exposed to at least a little history, literature, and maybe science.  Students continuing to high school were expected to go beyond that -  becoming proficient or at least adequate in simple composition, learning something about American and perhaps world history, studying the forms of the American governments, learning at least a little algebra and/or geometry, reading some good books and poetry, and maybe studying Latin or a modern foreign language.

High school was supposed to be fairly rigorous and supposed to require a fair amount of intelligence, commitment, and work from students. (Years ago, a professor of mine showed me his mother’s high school transcript  from the country school far out in the sticks she attended in the early days of the 20^th Century.  It listed only real academic subjects, and quite a few of them, including, as best as I can remember, Latin.) Fewer people graduated from high school in those days, but a high school diploma gave evidence of some actual learning and accomplishment. In the decades after  World War II, people in authority decided that almost everyone should graduate from high school. Over time the curricula and expectations changed to accommodate that goal. Now many more people graduate from high school, but a high school diploma does not guarantee the level of accomplishment once required to graduate from the eighth grade, not even the ability to read a newspaper or do simple arithmetic. (Of course many people these days graduate from high school having learned lots of thing well and studied a variety of serious and important subjects. However doing so is not a requirement, and many students can and do graduate without learning much or working much.) A prospective employer cannot assume much of anything about the worth of a young person on the basis of a high school diploma alone, and hasn’t been able to do so for a good while.

If politicians succeed in arranging for almost everyone to attend college and for almost everyone who enrolls to graduate, it will not be too long before a critic will be able to say the same thing truthfully about the value of a bachelor’s degree. That would be a sad waste of time, money, and four years of young people’s lives. 

Voltaire

I recently finished reading Voltaire’s Philosophy of History. I’ve read and admired his writings for years and am struck by the degree to which he is ignored these days.  Part of the reasons for it may be  that his philosophical works were well and clearly written and  focused on how people should live their lives and function in the real world, and are thus fairly far removed from the concerns and practices of many professors of philosophy and likely to be disparaged by them.  Part of it may  be a belief (an erroneous one I think) that the superstition, dogmatism, intolerance, and fanaticism he opposed are things of the past and  that  the battles he fought are long since won. Part of it may be, as Andre Maurois suggested in a preface to one of Voltaire’s other books,  that the opinion makers of our time  have more of taste for mysticism and the irrational than their counterparts of the enlightenment did.  I am afraid that at least some of it is due to the liberal  ideas of toleration of dissent, rational discourse,  and a free marketplace of ideas being out of fashion with many people today. 

Whatever the reasons for it, it is a mistake. He was a fine and enjoyable writer, and the ideas of reason, tolerance, science, and progress need defending today as much as they did in his century, and maybe more.  There is still plenty of infamy out there.