Posted on 03/04/2010 8:02:50 AM PST by bs9021
Twilight For Seniors
Malcolm A. Kline, March 4, 2010
A Utah Republican legislator has proposed scrapping senior year of high school to save state funds. “According to the unwritten constitution that governs ordinary American life and makes possible a shared pop culture that even new immigrants can jump right into after a few movies and a trip to the mall, the senior year of public high school is less a climactic academic experience than an occasion for oafish goofing off, chronic truancy, random bullying, sloppy dancing in rented formalwear and interludes of moody, wan philosophizing (often at sunrise while still half-drunk and staring off at a misty river or the high-school parking lot) about the looming bummer of adulthood,” Walter Kirn writes in the February 28, 2010 issue of The New York Times magazine. “In films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dazed and Confused and High School Musical 3, senior year is a do-little sabbatical from what is presented as the long dull labor of acquiring knowledge, honing skills and internalizing social norms.”
“It’s a spree, senior year, that discharges built-up tensions.” Kirn, author of Lost in the Meritocracy, likes the Utah plan.
“My hunch is that nothing will happen,” he writes. “Nothing much.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
In countries where academics are still highly valued, Senior year is the time when students are frantically studying and preparing for the intense entrance exams to get into the best colleges and universities.
If they get rid of the senior year, wouldn’t the junior year become the goof off year? And so on and so on and so on.
Why worry about scrapping the senior year? In public schools, K thru 11 has been pretty much scrapped already.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this, but I’d guess it might work for those students who are motivated. For those that aren’t it probably doesn’t matter. I was certainly ready for college after my 11th grade.
—fifty years ago, the senior year was as important as any of the rest, especially if you had hopes of going to college and making something of yourself beyond farm labor—but of course, then “college” professors (and students) taught and learned something and even had to appear on campus five days a week , unlike much of academia today-—
Ummm... wouldn't THAT be the actual problem ?
Yeah! One things for sure...no one in our NEA run, festering pits of leftist thought EVER goof off, drink or do unseemly stuff during the first THREE years of high school!!! Too busy PREPARING for senior year, no doubt. Apparently this joker is a republican in the McCain, Grahamnesty and Specter moulds.
However, I've seen what the graduating classes are producing in the way of English composition and rudimentary math skills, and we could probably repurpose Senior year back to education and never miss a beat. An Advanced History of White Guilt doesn't really prepare one for the academic environment as well as a lot of education-union pedagogues think it does. They can't read or write either.
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