What should happen in high schools to prepare students for the future? A decade ago, email was in its infancy, the World Trade towers stood proudly in New York City and our economy was in full bloom. Today all of that is history; change is the norm and the future is uncertain. What does that mean for education in high schools? What do high-school students need in order to be positioned for success in the next 10, 20 and 50 years? How can parents be sure that their children are getting the experiences they need?
It may be natural to seek the same qualities that were in fine schools when we were growing up. The temptation is always to go with what we know, and it’s even more comforting to proceed down the familiar path in times of uncertainty. It’s easy to think that success will come if we can do it better and faster and more cheaply, whatever the “it” is. But that would be a big mistake. Former Secretary of Education Richard Riley says that the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004. The world is changing at an alarming clip, and high schools need to get ahead of the curve, not just follow behind.
High schools, whether city or county or rural, public or private or parochial, big or small or medium-size, must focus on three important areas if they are to prepare students to succeed in life, not just in school. Regardless of a school’s context or the characteristics of students who attend, proficiency in each of these domains will be essential if students are to succeed in the real world. Students will need to have scholastic skills, possess technological acumen and master their personal intelligences (or emotional intelligence, a.k.a. EQ). Parents need to ensure that each of these areas of focus is included in the curricula at their children’s schools. Those students who excel in all three areas will be ready for whatever curves tomorrow’s world throws at them.
Scholastic Skills
Standards are always changing, attitudes toward tattoos and baggy pants being two all-too-notable examples. But academic standards have not changed: It is still important that students know how to read, write and calculate well. Indeed, they need to know how to read, write and calculate better than is the norm today. Nationwide, only 70 percent of high-school students graduate, and even many of them are scholastically unprepared for college. In his 2008 book The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner notes that 40 percent of our college students must take remedial courses and that the U.S. now ranks 10th among industrialized nations in the rate of college completion. Granted, the rate of college completion is only one indicator of how much progress we’re making as a society, but the statistics are nonetheless troubling. We need to expect that our students will be challenged academically, and too often this is not the case.
A quick litmus test to determine a high school’s academic rigor is the writing students are assigned and the feedback they receive on their work. Students should be given writing assignments in many classes, not only in English or creative writing, and their work should be reviewed. It’s not enough to receive a letter grade, even a good one; students need to understand both the mechanics and flow of writing. Oddly, because technology offers so many other ways to communicate, the value of the written word has increased. A small handwritten note has great power—as long as the meaning isn’t hijacked by misspellings or poor grammar. Text messages and spellcheck may suggest otherwise, but the college student who misuses there for their or it’s for its sends an indelible message. High-school students need to own the three R’s.
Technological Skills
In many ways, technological acumen has become the equivalent of the fourth R. Just as students need to master the academic basics, they must also know how to take advantage of technology. More than we may imagine, technology has changed how we work and live. If you doubt that, ask any of Facebook’s more than 150 million active members. Or consider that it took the St. Louis Public Library 135 years to acquire 4.5 million holdings; the Internet adds that many new documents every three days. Googling “St. Louis” yields more than 81 million results, and “Obama” offers 241 million. There are more than 250 million Web searches each day (up from 150 million just three years ago). The availability of this information is instantaneous and truly global, but not without its dangers. It’s helpful to have the world at our fingertips, but if information is to become knowledge, then students must know why they’re searching, what information is relevant and valid, and the difference between searching and surfing.
Beyond the Internet, students need to be adept at using a range of computer applications, from those creating spreadsheets to term papers to presentations. These are, in a sense, simply new and better ways of sharing information (remember the overhead projector?). Beyond this, students should be comfortable using multimedia applications (music, photo and video) as well as messaging applications. Technology and multimedia applications change not only how we share information, but also what information is shared. Looking ahead, it’s clear that possessing these kinds of technological skills will change from being an advantage to being an expectation; lacking them will become an obstacle to success.
The combination of social networks and open collaboration on the Web offers remarkable possibilities. (See the November 19, 2008, New York Times article “Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing.”) Notes Billy Handmaker, head of St. Louis’ Crossroads College Prep, “As students use the Web to create and tailor their experiences, they have amazing chances to influence trends and events as individuals within a community.” The pervasiveness of technology won’t diminish, even though we may come to think about it quite differently. According to inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, by 2019 a $1,000 personal computer will be approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain, and we’ll not always know what’s human and what’s a machine. Yet all the technology in the world won’t overcome a deficiency in working with other people, and that’s why the personal intelligences are so important.
Personal Intelligences
High schools also need to teach students how to work with others. In the past, this wasn’t a part of the formal curriculum. It either happened or it didn’t. Class presidents and maybe prom queens had strong social skills, and the rest of us, well, let’s hope we had other strengths. Today, however, everyone needs to have a strong EQ (emotional intelligence quotient). Learning how to learn and learning how to be a good teammate must be a focus in high school. Steve Warmack, principal of Clyde C. Miller Career Academy in the St. Louis Public Schools, refers to this as “introducing students to the expectations of the workplace while developing the attitudes and skills necessary for success.” Sister Barbara Roche, president of Nerinx Hall High School, describes it as “developing confidence in themselves, their own sense of worth and their unique voice, preparing them for habits of expression that allow them to create balance for themselves and others.” Often the arts are a venue for students to learn about themselves and others. Keith Shahan, head of John Burroughs School, says students should be more engaged in the arts, “because the creative problem-solving that all the arts necessitate transfers to any field of endeavor, in addition to enriching your life.”
In his 2005 book The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman demonstrated how Americans routinely compete and work with people around the globe. Indeed, the odds are low that you’re wearing any clothing made in the U.S. and high that the person you talk to when you call the 800 number for computer help is sitting on another continent. Interactions are changing within our country, too. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, people of color are expected to become the majority by 2042, with the nation projected to be 54 percent non-white in 2050. By 2023, it’s projected that more than half of all children in our country will be members of minorities (meaning, of course, that all of the minority groups will comprise a majority). This flatter and smaller world means that more and more we will find ourselves working with people whose religions, cultures and languages differ from ours.
Succeeding in these new and different kinds of relationships will draw upon the EQ described by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence. He states that people with a strong EQ “are at an advantage in any domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics.” Because achieving success in life is far more difficult without strong personal intelligences, schools must take responsibility for helping develop their students’ EQ. Specifically, high schools need to make sure that students learn how to work together and understand what it means to be leaders and colleagues. Students must be comfortable disagreeing with their peers, doing so effectively and presenting arguments to audiences of strangers. They need to have insights into their own learning and working styles and know how to learn. This will occur only when schools support many different kinds of student achievement and when being a good team member is modeled, taught and valued.
Success in Life
Put together, this all means that high schools need to look beyond their walls. They should focus on preparing students to succeed in the real world, not just in school. It is important to encourage students to perform well on standardized tests, and they need to be able to read, write and calculate, but that’s just the beginning. High schools should help students learn how to learn, teach them how to define problems and use technology to find solutions, and enable them to work with all kinds of people. This means that high schools need a broader curriculum, one that views students as people and as learners. It’s a wonderful time for community service experiences that show students how each of us can make a difference in the world. As David Laughlin, the president of St. Louis University High School, notes, “High schools play an important role in creating a community where young adults can reach beyond themselves socially in order to grow into who they are becoming. This involves trial and error of friends, activities and interests.” High schools are preparing students for success in 10, 20 and 50 years, not just next June.
What Can Parents Do?
First, parents need to ask their children and the school’s teachers and administrators: To what degree is each of these areas embedded in the curriculum? It’s certainly nice when schools score well on standardized tests and win athletic trophies, but that’s not sufficient. Chances are that evidence of a school’s scholastic focus abounds. But it can be harder to find out how students are prepared technologically and harder still to determine how their EQ is developed. One can tell a lot about what a school values from what it measures, so parents should also ask how student progress is assessed. Educators should be talking about what they are doing to prepare students for a lifetime of success.
If all of these components are not present, parents need to work to get them included in the curriculum. Parents should ask and push and push again. They can use these questions to begin a dialogue: “What opportunities exist for developing emotional intelligence in the classroom and after school? In what classes do students explicitly learn how to learn? Is technology routinely used in teaching and learning? How comfortable is the faculty with using technology?”And perhaps most relevant: “Ten years later, what do graduates say about their education?” Parents are their children’s advocates, and they need to be sure that school prepares them for the future.
About the author: Tom Hoerr, who holds a Ph.D. from Washington University, is the head of New City School in the Central West End. A former public school principal and teacher, he has authored three books, including School Leadership for the Future, published last fall.
