Columnist Jay Mathews of the Washington Post recently wrote about teaching languages in high school as a waste of time - the argument being that very few people come out of high school language courses with anything resembling fluency.
For a reply by Language Magazine staffer Kate Sommers-Dawes, check out the following link:
Columnist Calls Language Learning Useless
I'd like to join with Kate's observation that high school Language is about as useful as high school Biology by pointing out that all high school learning is useless. Everything Mathews says about Language classes could be equally applied to pretty much every subject you can take in high school - including Maths and English.
No one actually comes out of high school fully equipped to do anything. Well, except sleep. And even then, a lot of kids these days can't even seem to manage that.
After you leave high school, you start to figure out what you want to know or need to know, and that's when you actually start learning things that will do you some good. What high school does is make things just that little bit easier when it comes to the "real" education you get from life. I can do X, or Y a little more easily because I started learning them in high school, therefore I'm not starting completely from scratch.
In high school you learn how to lay a brick. Just one. Is laying one brick useful? If you never intend to lay another brick, then no. If, on the other hand, you'd like to build a wall one day, then knowing how to lay a brick is a good place to start.
The question is, how do you know if you really and truly never will lay another brick?
When I was in high school, I was sure my future career was in advertising. I stacked my subjects to make sure I took the communication courses, and beyond that I took what I was most interested in. Sure, I was interested in Biology - but I was more interested in Ancient History. I didn't end up taking any Science classes at all, in the end...
And now I'm a liaison librarian for the schools of Pharmacy and Veterinary Science. Taking Biology or Chemistry might have made things a little easier for me in the long run. However, the history courses I took in high school gave me an edge during my university studies, and will still be useful for my future plans, so they certainly weren't wasted.
Bricks and walls.
Yet, why are people constantly challenging subjects like Languages and History? If few people come out of high school with an immediately useful knowledge of Biology, why do you never hear people complaining about the money spent on science labs?
And why do people think the resources spent on Drama are a waste of money, but the resources spent on football are fine? You'll have about as many professional football players as actors come out of the average school...
What is it about the Humanities subjects that makes them so undervalued compared to everything? Especially communication? If you asked the average father* whether his son should learn to construct a sentence correctly or perform double-digits long division, he would probably pick the long division. Yet a calculator can compensate for a lack of mathematical ability, while there isn't a machine on the planet that can fix poor communication skills.
I can't count**, but I can communicate, and thus I am practically guaranteed a decent job for the rest of my life. In the long run, being able to construct a sentence is a more useful and practical skill than being able to divide double-digits.
If I could communicate effectively in several languages, then I would be able to work almost anywhere in the world, regardless of the fact that I have such a poor knowledge of Biology. So why are Communications subjects constantly challenged for relevance and usefulness, while Science subjects are unquestionably Good Things?
And whatever happened to the idea of a "well rounded" human being - someone who had a grounding in most things, and thus could inhabit both the world of the Sciences and the world of theHumanities with ease?
Here's a mathematical problem for you: can you devalue part of the whole without devaluing the whole?
* Yep, that was a gender stereotype. Fact is, men do tend to value sciences above communication. Probably because they are, relatively speaking, "not that good" at communication where as they are, relatively speaking, "quite all right" at science. And, you know, it's so much easier to devalue the things that aren't your strengths than to admit that someone else might be better than you at something...
** Okay, I can count. Just not very well.
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