By James Therrien
Berkshire Eagle Staff
NORTH ADAMS -- High school students would graduate at age 16 if Leon Botstein's controversial recommendations for the reform of secondary education were adopted.
In his blunt, businesslike style, the president of Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington outlined the views expressed in his book, " Jefferson's Children: Reforming the American High School," during a talk this past week at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
The speaker said his intent was to provide a brief "statement of my beliefs. My purpose is not to tell you something you already know." He said that is what too many educators who talk about reforming the public systems are doing.
Botstein, the president of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., as well as a well-known symphony orchestra conductor, acknowledged that while his book won praise, critics attacked his ideas from the left, right and center.
But he can shrug that off, he said, because his purpose was to prompt discussion and promote decisive reform within a secondary system that "is not working" and is "an affront to common sense."
What graduates retain or can do in the world "is trivial compared to the expense and effort," he asserted.
The current problems, Botstein said, "are not headaches," and require "radical intervention," as opposed to piecemeal reforms. Otherwise, conservative critics could gain the upper hand and slowly dismantle a public secondary system Botstein said should be restored.
He also rejected the idea that the era "when I went to school," as many people will say, was a better time. Those memories are typically unreliable and should be ignored in the interest of a fresh perspective, he said.
His reasoning for the dramatic recommendation of shortening secondary school careers by two years is based largely on biology and evolution, Botstein said. Perhaps because of diet and other factors, teens now are reaching sexual maturity an average of two years earlier.
One conclusion, he said, is that the final two years of high school have become "an utter waste of time" for many students. They are physically and emotionally ready to move into areas with more varied age groups, he said, and shouldn't be kept in a social setting precisely segregated by age.
He therefore recommends school consisting of kindergarten through sixth grade for elementary education, and seventh through 10th for junior and senior high school. This would help counter the current system's tendency to take a natural love of learning in students and "beat it out of them" by graduation, he said.
At 16, students should have the choice of going on to college -- as many now do in advance placement courses or early admission programs -- or to some type of public service or a two-year educational program of the student's choice, he said.
That could include working in the arts or in a computer field, he said, suggesting that new or existing publicly funded academies could offer such programs.
"They should do something that they really like," Botstein said.
Discussing specific problems, Botstein was critical of too much choice in schools, believing the secondary system "shouldn't be left to privatization." And he rejected the view of the political left that would lower standards to make some students seem to perform better.
The goal of education should be to raise the performance level of all students, he said, including the lowest and highest performing, by an equal amount.
In general, Botstein said, he wants to keep philosophical assumptions from clouding reform proposals, an affliction he discerns in most reform advocates.
Botstein also was critical of the European education model, which puts students on different, nearly irreversible tracks based on testing in the early teen years. He strongly favors retaining the American model of allowing anyone to reach for the highest level they can attain.
Too many tests
Botstein also decried an overreliance on testing in the American systems, saying, "Testing has nothing to do with learning," and tests are used in the United States "to an absolutely grotesque degree."
There also should be a focus on why students give the wrong answers and what the answers really say about the student, he said. Citing as an example a question that asked which president was in office during an event of World War II, Botstein sought to show that the student who selected Harry Truman had learned at least something about the era. The student who chose Woodrow Wilson knew he was associated with a world war, Botstein said, but only the one who chose Franklin Roosevelt scored any points on the test.
Concerning the training of teachers, Botstein said it is vital that there be cooperation and communication from the college level down to the elementary level. Too often, he said, college professors are professionally isolated from those who teach young children.
And he rejected the idea that the system should concern itself with promoting English as an official language. Many more people were bilingual during the 19th century, he said, and it took longer then for people to learn English.
There is pressure enough worldwide to learn English, he added, so that bolstering it at home shouldn't be a concern.