GUEST OPINIONN. Jeremy Kasdin
We were urged to vote for the school budget on April 17 (which I did) to support the "Princeton Difference". The budget rejection made we wonder, is it really making a difference? In particular, it made me recall the results released last month of a nationwide study on high school performance. It seems that despite years of increased workload and rigor, student scores have actually fallen.
I don’t know if the study results apply to PHS, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
High school has changed dramatically since I was a teenager. More hours in the classroom, more (a lot more) homework, more demanding curriculum, more AP classes, more activities.
Like everything else in America, more must be better. The problem is, our kids aren’t learning, they are recording. As long as we can stuff enough information into them (they don’t need sleep, do they?), then they’ll pass those tests and get into the "best" college, and what else matters?
The reality is that if we want to improve high school education we should be teaching less. One of the hardest lessons I learned as a college instructor was to include less material in my syllabus. It is so tempting for us to load up our courses with topics and information; everything is so important and we want to enrich our students with this vast storehouse of knowledge.
Unfortunately, kids are not empty vessels to be filled and almost all the research shows that the best retention happens when we cut back and emphasize active learning. When overwhelmed with information, students revert to "surface learning", that is, simple memorization. We forget that our insights and knowledge came after years of study and research and no matter how hard we try we can’t simply project this experience onto our students. Less truly is more.
Something has happened to high school education in this country. We seem to be moving closer to the model in many other countries where all that matters is what college you get into. High school has become intensely competitive. We are working our kids to death and what do we have to show for it? If the latest test results are to be believed, not much.
I see so many students arriving at college burnt out and adrift, having forgotten much of what they learned. They may have 5’s on their APs, but they seem to lack deep comprehension. It is not a measure of a good high school that it attempts to replace college with its plethora of AP courses and college level texts if students don’t have an essential grasp of algebra or can’t write a clear, concise, grammatically correct paragraph. Slow down and teach.
And for God’s sake, let them get some sleep.
N. Jeremy Kasdin is an associate professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department of Princeton University.

