A fierce critic of the American high school, Botstein, 52, author of the provocative 1997 book Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, argues that secondary education should end after 10th grade, when teenagers would move on to higher education, job training or some form of national service. "The ability of our high schools to actually engage older teenagers intellectually is very weak," says Botstein, whose own record is a testament to the potential merits of cutting high school short. The son of Polish doctors who fled Hitler's Europe, he graduated from a Manhattan public high school at 16, studied history and music at the University of Chicago and Harvard and became president of Bard at 28. He is also musical director of New York City's American
Symphony Orchestra and shares homes at Bard and in Manhattan with his wife, Barbara Haskell, a curator at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, and their children Clara, 14, and Max, 17, who attend private secondary schools in New York City. (Sarah, 27, a daughter from a previous marriage, works on the production staff of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.) Botstein spoke recently with senior writer Patrick Rogers.
What grade would you give to the American high school?
By and large, the system gets an F. There are exceptions, but high school in general is a catastrophe, and we should abolish it as we know it. It's at its worst for juniors and seniors. By then, dropout rates are rising exponentially in city schools, and even for college-bound students in suburban schools, those years are spent biding time until college.
Why do students lose interest?
There are two factors, one biological and the other cultural. In the '50s a child came of age sexually probably at 14 or 15 and graduated three or four years later. Today girls are reaching sexual maturity at 12 and 13, and the age of sexual activity has also dropped. So graduation once took place four years after the onset of sexual maturity; now it takes place six years after the onset. It doesn't mean kids are more mature, but they think they are.
What cultural factors make today's student different?
We live in a more mobile world where young people are much freer. They have the Internet, videos, movies and the telephone, which used to be expensive. And social constraints, whether imposed by family, church or community, are less strong today.
What effect does that have on the average student's schoolwork?
The students have simply outgrown the schools. Like elementary school, our high schools work on the theory that everything is done in the classroom. The kids sit still and listen, despite the hopes of our best teachers. They learn passively. So there is a clash between the world outside, where kids are active consumers and say to their parents, "Hey, don't bother me"—because it's the kids who are in charge at home—and a school system that still treats them like children. That clash is getting louder.
How would you rate the quality of teaching?
If you look back 50 years, it was reasonably high, because it was the only profession that women could enter. We've lost that monopoly. The women teachers of yesterday are the lawyers, scientists and doctors of today. Today teachers are trained in pedagogy, not in their subject matter. You don't have science taught by a scientist or history taught by a historian. And adolescents have an unerring sense for authenticity. They really understand very well if you know what you are talking about.
You've told us what's wrong with high school. Now how do you fix it?
You don't; you create a new system that has an elementary school and a secondary school that turns students out into the world at 16. They would go to four-year colleges or community college. We might create new opportunities for them in community service and new vocational, technical or artistic training institutes for those who don't want to go to college directly. But many will. There are already at least a million students in this country who are starting college at 16.
What is it about being in college, as opposed to high school, that helps a teenager mature?
Exposure to people of other ages. High school is age-segregated. You coop up 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds by grade and you create a world where status is very important. "Oh, I'm a senior, you're just a junior." That's ludicrous. High school is an artificial world, a world of puerile notions of beauty and what is masculine or feminine. But universities and businesses are often led by people who were the outsiders in that world. Who's running Microsoft? The popular jocks? No. Probably the nerds. People in college begin to take their lives seriously. If they are interested in business, they start to admire Bill Gates, or if it's science, then they admire Watson and Crick. They join the real conversation of life.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
