We've got spirit, yes we do
a column by Chris Jungle

President Clinton is getting really goofy about education. It wasn't too long ago that he cried out for public schools to have uniform dress for everybody, and now he's suggesting school years should be longer and standardized tests should be made for graduating high school. Now I'm not in school anymore, but I'm not so far removed from it that I don't remember the things I didn't want my school to do. First was the ever present fear that they could make school longer than it was, and one of the other ones was that I'd have to take more tests which wouldn't prove anything of anyone's intellect.

When I was in high school, the tardy bell rang at 8:15 in the morning, the final bell came at 3:15. That was seven hours of regular class and didn't include extracurricular classes (band, sports, ROTC), doing homework or working a job. My problem with adding more time to a school day is that there is too much time in the school day already. Teachers usually taught what they wanted to teach in forty minutes or less, and I can't count the hundreds of days we had free time (as long as we kept the noise to a minimum). President Clinton stated that Germany and Japan had longer school years and that they retained more information because of it. I still don't think ten or twenty more days of school would have helped me retain all of the Chinese Dynasty names I learned in World History, or understand the relevance of reading Tess of the D'ubervilles, or comprehend life better by dissecting one more beetle in biology.

Part of the deal with school is that there is a lot of baby-sitting going on--one of the reasons it is so popular with parents. Anything that gets their children out of their hair for half of the day is welcome, and if it's educational, that's just icing on the cake. Of course, parents will jump on the longer school days bandwagon, but that's like asking hunters if they want elk season to be longer. It's kind of funny that neither the elk nor the kids get to vote on the issues that effect them. I guess the parents and hunters will know what's best for them.

The president also said there should be a national test for kids graduating high school. What's funny is that many states already have standardized testing that kids have to pass to graduate high school. The test I took in tenth grade was pretty basic and mostly just stressful because it took three days to complete. I did pretty well even though I didn't brush up on subtracting fractions before hand. I'm sure there's someone out there crying out that some kids get high school diplomas and don't know how to subtract fractions, and I do have sympathy for those children. But one thing we need to understand is how much a high school diploma is worth.

A high school diploma basically means you have permission not to go to school anymore. It doesn't mean you can read, it doesn't say you are a good citizen, and it doesn't help get many jobs. All it means is that the state will no longer spend any money to keep you in school. And people with high school diplomas do all sorts of things. They go on to college, they work in retail, they become criminals, they become mechanics, they go into the military, they sell drugs, they live great lives, and they die wretched deaths.

A kid is going to do what he or she wants in high school. If they want to learn and grow into well-rounded human beings, they can. If they want to work out and be a football player, they can. If they want to sniff glue and move through the day in a haze, they can. No matter how many school days there are, no matter how matter tests are given, no matter what the kids wear, there are will always be kids who do well and poorly in high school.

Is there a solution to many of the problems that schools have? Could there be a positive thought anywhere in this column? Do all my writing quirks have to come in threes? The answer to all is an emphatic YES! The biggest problem I noticed in my younger school days was that I was in classes of twenty-five to thirty people. That's a lot of faces a teacher has to deal with every hour of the day. The best way to keep kids interested in education is not more toys, more time, or more tests, but more focus. There need to be more teachers. What good is a computer if the teacher only has five minutes to help each individual child learn on it?

I know I would've liked one teacher for ten students compared to one for thirty. It's one of those things I figured out when learning fractions.

Chris Jungle never considered dropping out of high school because that's where all the pretty girls were.

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