In Let Teenagers Try Adulthood the author’s argument that high school for the most part is useless and should be destroyed is very true. During high school you are getting a free education, but for some people this education is more rewarding than for others. In some cases, the teachers are more lenient towards athletes because they don’t want them to fail and miss that all important game. While the hard working students get punished because they spent their entire afternoon working on an essay and the athlete gets the weekend to finish the same essay.
For example, in high school you have cliques, which are composed of the very attractive people, the athletes or the very popular people in school. If a person is on the outside of these cliques they have a more difficult time in high school because they do not have the support of the community. Instead, the lack of support discourages them from being that one of a kind person during high school. The truth is the outsiders are the people who are getting the better paying jobs and are more successful in life than those who got to coast in high school.
The claim that high school truly prepares the student for the adult world is completely bogus. For instance, when a lot of students attend college they start to see all the time they wasted in high school and how it put their future in jeopardy. Now the truth of how life really is hits them. All of the partying they might have done in high school won’t help get them a well paying job. The rules of high school are not similar to the rules of life. It can be a struggle to convince a manager why you are the best fit for the job.
The author’s idea of eliminating middle school altogether by making elementary start at the age 5 and end after 6th grade is a great idea. This allows a student to go straight to high school for four years causing them to graduate at 16 instead of 18. This makes the kids join the real world sooner and those who weren’t serious about their education get to jump into the hard working environment immediately. The people who attend college and continue their education get professors based on their knowledge not their popularity. The people who sleep during school or skip half of the school year because they don’t feel like attending, will see how cruel the workplace will be with that kind of attitude. Botstein is correct regarding how the late twentieth century to present day teenagers have grown more mature than previous generations. This means they should definitely be brought into adulthood earlier than most people have been in the past.
This set up would open the eyes of many youth in the world by turning them into adults sooner than expected. The community can still provide steps that help young people ease into it because it is about trying adulthood not being forced to drown in it. That’s why we should get rid of a high school system that really isn’t needed by most teenagers.
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