A Second-Rate Secondary Education

In this sense, Europe and the rest of the world are ahead of America. Most advanced nations have a constructive national presence in educational policy in the setting of national standards for teachers and schools. For the United States to improve the education performance of its adolescents, it must make education a national priority in terms of funding and expectations, just like health care.

The overriding concern in the United States is how to recruit better-trained teachers and reward them more adequately. A first step is to return a measure of autonomy to the classroom teacher. High-school teachers should be held to high standards in the same way as university professors, whose professional autonomy and responsibility for quality are managed together. School for the adolescent should be engaging and inspiring in a way that shows that securing power, success, and wealth are wholly contingent on knowledge and the use of the intellect. The most successful strategy is to put an end to our ambivalence about adolescence. This means ending compulsory standardized secondary schooling at least two years earlier than is now commonly done. University-style education that treats students as adults should begin at 15 or 16, not 18.

What universities offer, particularly for 18- to 20-year-olds, is instruction by individuals who are more than teachers but practitioners and experts in their fields. Just as adolescents in the eighteenth century apprenticed with master artisans, we need to offer adolescents a comparable opportunity in the classroom. Through education, our democracies need to find ways to cultivate among the young the admiration of elites in learning just as we do in sports and entertainment. Teachers of adolescents should be professionals in science, the arts, social sciences and humanities.

The university is characterized by a combination of more freedom and higher expectations than exist in secondary schools. Ironically, in secondary schools there is a demand for uniformity and regulation of behavior that results in less autonomy and the dumbing down of academic expectations. The young adult needs to experience the desire to know, and to recognize the intimate connection between knowledge and the conduct of life. Motivating a child is far easier than motivating an adolescent. Learning can inspire new goals. After all, in the future we will need fewer lawyers and managers, and more engineers, scientists and inventors.

The most successful strategy for solving the problem of inadequate education for adolescents is the burgeoning early college movement in the United States. The quickest way to introduce university-type education at an earlier age is to provide incentives to universities to take over public secondary schools and assume responsibility for their curricula, staff, and management—in other words, to step in where direct state and local control has failed.

Educational reform is akin to planting a fruit tree where the first harvest is many years off, well beyond the normal cycle of elections and political careers. Therefore, let us put politicians at bay. Education may not be a science, but we ought to give its practice proper respect: we don't determine medical treatments by free elections, and we don't permit patients to manage hospitals. The reason the university is essential to solving the problem of secondary schooling is because the public accepts that true scholarship and learning are legitimate areas of expertise for the university. The same assignment of control and responsibility needs to be ceded to teachers in the arena of secondary schooling.