I was just reading up on a biography of Daniel Lewin, the late CTO of Akamai off whose stock I made a pile of money back in the day. He was a brilliant young man and may have gotten a taste of Muhammad Atta's blood on Flight AA 11 seven years ago. His personal history is fascinating, my kinda mensch.
Anyway it turns out that he attended a joint called the Technion in Israel before mesmerizing the faculty at MIT. As I have been thinking of secondary education the past few days I have been compelled to think about University based high schools. We have one at the University of Chicago that's fairly well known - I wonder if there are others notable here in California or elsewhere. Basically, I think that four years of college prep is not the best way to go - that collegians need a bit more maturity and they need to get the stupid out of their system, as in 'Lets Get Retarded' before they can truly benefit from a sterling undergraduate program.
So as I'm reading up on the Technion, I see the following.
Students attending the Mechina for new immigrants are given personal counseling which includes guidance regarding service in the Israel Defence Forces and university studies in Israel. A variety of social activities, including tours, are provided in cooperation with the Ministry of Absorption.
Whoa.
These Mechina are essentially a full academic year of preparation in which they teach technical subjects at the 5 point Bagrut level. The what? Aside from the seriousness which mandatory military service implies, evidently the Israelis have worked out a system, as it turns out roughly analagous the the British system, that includes some distinction between those who are going to college for real, and those who are going for show - which ultimately we Yanks have to admit that a good number of our colleges are.
Somebody surely has a statistic of worth that shows how many more Americans as a percentage of our national population are attending university classes. But how many of us ever really bother with calculus, eh? We already know in our culture that certain concentrations are 'joke' majors and that certain collegiate cultures are foolish in the extreme. So how did we get to this sorry state of affairs? Well, that's not as important as understanding that it remains true that many of our students and students from around the world are very well served by our universities. But we know that our public secondary ed is not pulling its weight.
As a side note, at my old high school, Loyola, I was informed that it's very difficult for the administration of the Jesuits to convince those priests and brothers who want to teach, to teach at the secondary level. They prefer to teach at universities whose schedules are less demanding.
It is absolutely true that the best thing a prep school can do is not teach material but prepare a student for the rigors of absorbing real material. So who is bothering to take that time? Obviously those private schools where the best and brightest would send their kids, and where people who are quite capable of making money from their brains actually prefer a rigorous academic environment. The rigors of serious study are what we are missing from our highschools, but the joke wouldn't be complete if there weren't complementary colleges and universities which lacked rigor as well.
My solution then would be to let high school be high school, and let a diploma be a diploma, but then let there be a rigorous machina or A-Level or Five Point Bagrut level finishing school be the necessary gateway between average competence and rigorous competence.
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