Year 13?
February 9th, 2010 by Robert Merkel | Published in Education | 28 Comments
While this thread about “essential” knowledge was mostly tongue in cheek, I reckon there’s a serious point to be made – in that a lot of knowledge that isn’t particularly difficult to grasp, and generally useful, is only acquired by a relatively small subset of people who study a topic at a tertiary level (be that at a university or at TAFE).
In the USA, spreading this knowledge around is, to some extent, performed by their generalist undergraduate tertiary education system – though I also get the sense that at least some of the first year of college education is filling in the gaps left by their mediocre high schools. The Melbourne Model of generalist degrees followed by (fee-paying, in large part) professional Masters courses also heads in this direction. But that leaves a vast pool of young people who choose vocational education, or choose to head straight into the workforce, whose generalist education stopped at Year 10 (in Victoria, at least), and as such may well have missed out on the fundamentals of statistics, for instance.
So how should this be remedied? Teach more in the earlier years of high school? I’m not sure students are sufficiently mature at that point; perhaps the teachers who read LP can comment, but from what I can recall the middle years of high school involve a fair bit of treading water. And cramming more into the final year curriculum of high school isn’t likely to achieve much either; increasing breadth of the year 12 curriculum would only seem possible at the cost of making the individual subjects even shallower.
So, as a thought bubble, why not create a Year 13, doubling the number of advanced secondary units people study, so that everyone (or, at least, a much broader cross-section of the community) can study both the humanities and the sciences at least to an advanced secondary level?
I’m not proposing that this is best taught at secondary schools. Instead, it would be taught as part of the first year of university courses, and TAFE courses (strongly encouraging its completion as part of apprenticeships, for instance); perhaps tbe academically gifted could choose to knock those extra subjects off at high school as part of accelerated programs.
Is this feasible? Would it be worth the cost? And, importantly, how do you think the average 18-year-old would feel about it?
Jesus Christ, I figure enough curriculum is already focussed on subjects with approximately 0% value for anyone not going to uni – and there’s even more that are 0% unless you major in a particular field. And yet students have to bear it all anyway, and continue their schooling longer and longer. That’s fine for some (it was fine for me), but it’s not fine for everybody, and chaining em to the desk for one more year I think is unlikely to resolve the problem.
I believe in Italy, high school is somewhat different, with a “Liceo” system, where students essentially complete senior years at speciailist highschools with a focus that dovetails more neatly with predicted university majors. It’s a great system for further study, but not much help for those that don’t fit the standard mould.
But, really, is there a problem here? “Useful” is a pretty vague term to be hurling about with regards to education. Especially because you’re then forced to question not just what isn’t taught, but what is. God, huge portions my undergraduate arts degree,and honours thesis on images of Beauty and the Beast haven’t exactly served me vocationally in my roles in PR and communications (though I grant, they were very handy as a freelance journo back in the day).
Dear God, yes, teach more in middle school. There’s a big problem with lowered expectations of that age group, but they’re old enough to absorb a lot more knowledge than one might think. Stats in particular desperately needs to be worked into curricula earlier, and not just in math classes.
More time at school is absolutely not the answer – its too long for many people already. The devil’s in the detail when it comes to effective teaching.
Has possibilities. A broad generalist course could introduce the beginning student to dip into the broad spectrum of specialties including the more esoteric ones (such as Journalism!). As such it would allow a better choice of subsequent career path and also could also give the ultimately emerging professional graduate professional a better understanding of other professional areas and academic specialties. From what I remember of early undergrads their idea of academics specialties can be very limited and it too late to change streams when they see that they have gone in the wrong direction.
Elongating secondary school years by adding in year 13 just widens the gap between those who leave school at Year 10 and those who continue studying.
Most Year 9 kids are bored out of their brain and they are are bored quietly or bored noisily and disruptively.
I think many kids would benefit from joining the workforce at Year 9 where they are taught their job by an adult rather than being 1 of the 25 being prepared for life outside the classroom by a teacher who they don’t think has an understanding of life outside the classroom.
All those shop assistants at Chadstone are university students working part time, now I know you can study Retailing at university but is it necessary to work in a chain store with a central buying and distribution system.
I love the idea Robert, they have this in Norway – and we had a heap of Norwegians at our uni that performance wise (and people-wise) were miles ahead of the locals – mind you this could also be because the Scandanavian countries specialise early in high-school in either humanitites or sciences (which meant in a humanities course they had already concentrated more time in their field). Having said that a lot of people are not goign to like the idea of an extra-year.
I also agree, Year 9 and Year 10 are soft-as, there should be more taught in those years – heaps of the private schools are teaching HSC months before Year 10 is even finished. Is there a way we could incentivise year 10 being taken more seriously, it seems only when university entrance is at stake that exams are taken seriously.
I also like the idea of a Year 13, but there will be a lot of resistence to it – I noticed Arne Duncan was toying with extending either the number of hours at school, or the school calendar (America has a few less weeks a year of education than we do). I think it would be better to have an extra-year, as I’m sceptical that longer hours or shortering break period too much is going to yield as much learning as an extra year.
Sounds like a waste of my time.
Like it, too, Robert.
Just would point out the prep years effectively mean we already have a ‘year 13′, known as year 12*.
But nonetheless, its a good idea. Some unis are moving towards common first year courses based on generic research, writing, and presentation skills.
But of course, that doesnt cover the needs to the populace in general. It sounds a bit like the German system of “Abitur”.
C’mon, Robert, you should know Parkinson’s Law by heart. Add another year and the current curriculum will simply get delivered more slowly.
It doesn’t help that years 8, 9 and 10 are basically a holding pattern. Like you I don’t recall learning any great volume of material until I hit year 11.
Incidentally, countries that do better on international (boo! hiss!) league tables have a simple method of improving scores. They have longer teaching days and longer teaching years.
Incidentally, universities are brutally inefficient. I would stake a round of drinks that 90% of students come to the university to learn their chosen field quickly, completely and efficiently. Not to be prepared to be academics at a snail’s pace. Supposing teaching happened 44 weeks a year, I could have done my computer science degree in less than two years and gotten into work much sooner.
If I was a vice-chancellor, I would start sending invoices to high schools for performing remedial education.
Das Arbitur ist die examen am ende der Hochschule – like our HSC or VCE or whatever we call it now.
“Supposing teaching happened 44 weeks a year, I could have done my computer science degree in less than two years and gotten into work much sooner.”
Yeah, Deakin got that idea, and introduced a trimester two years ago. With exams, thats 42 teaching weeks (3 x 14) instead of 30 (2 x 15). They dropped swotvac to fit it in.
Turns out domestic students work 20 hrs a week, and don’t want or can’t do their subjects more quickly. Also turns out internationals like to see something of australia while they’re here.
Upshot is, they enrol in the same number of subjects per year: but across 3 sems, instead of 2.
So it costs the uni more in staff teaching time, and hasnt resulted in any increased fee income. Net loss!!
Of course, staff and students could have told them that – but management knew better. Didnt do any market research, just took it for granted that “Students will want to finish asap”.
Turned out to be an incorrect assumption.
I stand corrected. But pissed off, because I would have LOVED to have a trimester structure so I could zip through faster.
Yep – some students really love it Jacques. Its just that it turns out they are a minority!
The Deakin VC has recently ‘moved on’. Enough said.
I don’t know anything about the take-up of accelerated Deakin options, but in terms of gaining market share of domestic applications Deakin has been by far the strongest performer in Victoria in recent years. No doubt there are multiple factors at work, but I would not rule out the trimester being a factor.
Given the high proportion of fixed or only slightly variable costs in facilities and staff salaries, a trimester system could fairly easily make economic sense for universities with relatively light research activity.
I’m at risk of doing the boring old fart thing here. I didn’t find (mid 60s) that what are now called Years 8, 9 and 10 were a holding pattern – we were taught a shitload, culminating in the Intermediate Examinations (public exams at the end of Year 10).
It was only a few years before I matriculated that you could get into university with the Leaving Certificate (what is now called Year 11).
“So how should this be remedied?”
Why should it be “remedied”?
When you listen to all the extras various commentators insist should be part of our education you would think that education must be about preparing people for a trivial pursuits competition rather than preparing them to live reasonable lives in a rapidly changing world. For example, when I think about how much of the knowledge I gained in my degree I actually use in my engineering degree the answer is very little. The maths I used was largely a combination of parts of high school maths and specialty specific maths that I learned on the job without formal instruction.
I may be a cynic, but I think the reason that all engineering degrees have been four year degrees for yonks is that no-one is willing to admit that it doesn’t really take four years to train their particular branch of engineering. The key curriculum question is not “what do engineers need to learn before graduation?” but “how the hell are we going to pad this out to four years?”
To be fair, time needs to be allowed for students straight out of school to grow up, and some of the subjects that were of no direct use helped stretch our minds, teach us how to learn and develop general problem solving skills. Even so, there were quite a few subjects that provided neither useful information, general problem solving skills etc. Then there was the informal learning that came from arguing with other bright young minds. Nothing much would have been lost if my degree had had enough padding stripped out to reduce it to a two year degree.
The padding issue becomes even more serious when we are talking about what needs to be done to allow someone to change skills to adapt to changing skill demands. (The issue needs to be addressed from an efficiency point of view, not “how can this help my university get more business.)
There are similar problems in schools made worse by people who want to add their nice to haves to the teaching load. Too my mind the core business of schooling should not be to stuff more and more into young minds. The core business is about teaching kids:
1. To be curious and to want to learn more.
2. How to learn.
3. How to solve new problems.
4. How to to deal with new ideas and information.
5. How to communicate.
In addition, schooling has to be about challenging, stretching and developing young minds no matter how bright they are.
We should be looking for the best ways of achieving the above before we try and answer questions about how much schooling is required.
I’d also add to Lefty E’s comment that most collaborative research seems to get done in semester breaks because it’s the only time you can get multiple staff in the same place at the same time for any more than an hour or so.
Possibly you would have to make that year 10.5 in order to catch the early leavers before they charged off to a lifetime of tradey hard slog. Or perhaps you could open children’s minds from an early age by, and I hate harping on these things, teaching them to think for themselves with an embedding of philosophy.
http://education.qld.gov.au/learningplace/stories/articles/art-edviews-mar05-2.html
It’s a shame that it took “what iz name” to give this initiative the recognition it deserved and not the enlightened ALP. Maybe there is just so might light arcing from the ALP caucus that they cannot see the soft glow of individual genius from the community all around. From my observation people who learn to ask questions with a passion not only find answers, but they learn to teach themselves.
I am thinking about this in a hotel room in Qingdao. What an eye opener this city is.
John D,
From my experience studying engineering, I think greater coordination with industry for short employment stints for students throughout their degree would be a better option than shortening the degree.
Surely subjects such as English & Maths are essentially prerequisites for these?
desipis – when I did my engineering degree we needed to have about 3 months of engineering work experience before we were allowed to graduate. Employers knew this and many offered paid work experience to students even though looking back now, and having had to supervise work experience students, many don’t actually make a net contribution.
Lots of engineering students during my time did work every xmas holidays and some ended up with part time jobs during the year. And its not a bad opportunity for employers to give potential future employees a test run without an obligation to hire them at the end.
Chris,
I had that too, however it’s mostly just an independent requirement. I’m talking experience that is integrated with the subject matter taught in the degree. The content of the subjects I studied seemed entirely focused on understanding how things work, rather than understanding how to make things that work.
I remember how I felt about finishing school at age 18. An extra year? I would have quite likely strangled to death the person that came up with the idea.
Desipis: I did the first year of my degree as a part time trainee. It was useful because it gave me a chance to realize that the reality of geology was different from what I thought it was going to be. In addition, once I switched to engineering, it gave practical experience that helped put what I was studying in context.. However, I think I would have been better off finishing my degree earlier and getting my practical experience as a graduate. As a working engineer I preferred to employ new graduates who had a good theoretical framework on which to hang the specifics of the site they were working at rather than graduates that wasted time “being practical” at the expense of developing the theoretical framework. (Doesn’t mean that good theory cannot be based around practical activities that grab students interest.)
I also wouldn’t have missed the experience of full time uni at a small campus in the early sixties. I needed time to be immature, do stupid things and argue endlessly we students from other faculties. In many ways the arguing gave insights into people issues, logic etc that are often more important to the reality of what engineers actually do compared with grey sludge like organic chemistry.
I was not suggesting that you should learn about learning by studying learning theory. Much of learning about learning comes from doing a lot of learning over a range of subjects then spending a relatively small amount of time talking about improving learning skills. However, what I am saying is that, in many cases, the really useful thing is learning how to learn rather than the things that were learned – and that this must be recognized. It also means that the selection of subjects must take into account their usefulness as platforms for learning these core skills.
Similar comments could be made about the other items on my list. This doesn’t mean that some subjects aren’t essential. We need high competencies in things like reading and writing to do most of these things well and it is a bit hard to imagine seriously stretching students without taking maths beyond what they will actually need in life. I would also comment that most of what I know about geography and history I learned outside of the formal system by reading and discussion. For subjects like these the role of the school is to spur interest rather than teaching a great deal. Spuring interest might be better done by the occasional guest speaker than the drudgery of learning the subject.
Add “learning to detect bullshit to the list. Meant to put it in but forgot.
DINR@16: My wife and I both finished school in 1960 which meant we only did 5 years in high school. Can’t say we have noticed any real difference between us and people who took 6 years. Part of the problem was that the change to six years was done by adding a year to junior high school rather than senior high school.
The other problem is that tertiary institutes gave no credit for the extra learning time. so all it did was add a year to the age of graduation. An extra year of senior school that was designed to trim, say, half a year off tertiary education would have given students more time in subjects that they were not going to study, room for occasional speaker time and less impact on the length of ones working life.
It is worth noting that, in my time most NSW tradesmen started their apprenticeships with three years less schooling than they do now. However, apprenticeships still take the magic 4 years despite this extra education.
Perhaps it would help if vocational qualifications were based on external competency tests that were set up to asses on the basis of real needs, not nice to haves. And time paying fees to the education business was not one of the requirements.
John D,
I am currently doing full time mechanical engineering and I work full time in the mining/minerals industry during the university breaks. I agree with you that this type of experience is extremely important. I end up doing around 24 weeks of work during the year, full time and the types of things I see and do are invaluable to the way I look at problems back at university.
The problem with three trimesters is that everything gets squeezed too much — you end up having 12 week semesters that are taught straight through without a break and also have no Swat-vac. This means that to get everything done on time and back to students before their exams, you have to do things earlier and earlier in semester in less and less space, so everyone ends up wanting assignments due on the same week, and so you have “assignment jam”. The main solution to this is to make assignments even easier and reduce content even more (is it fair to test students in an exam on stuff they learnt 3 days before? I don’t think so, and this can certainly happen with no Swat-vac) so you end up with what may as well be an 11 week semester — this is exactly what is happening where I work where they are trying to structure stuff so presumably they can use three trimesters in some areas.
At least in my experience, I also wouldn’t hold Deakin up as a role model for anything, even if they are expanding (which I assume is probably mainly driven by their location and the fact they have space, unlike many other universities in Melbourne). Their graduates are so woeful that we never invite any into our 4th year, and that’s not a selection effect, because we do take others from universities with similar ENTER scores.
Robert, I doubt the US ‘college’ system is so good with improving the general knowledge of the population. From what I’ve gleaned online, it covers what I did in Year 11-12.
In NSW, we have the TVET system. Year 11-12 students who don’t want to go to Uni can start doing a TAFE course while attending school (they come to my TAFE one afternoon a week). Their marks count towards the HSC but not towards a TER. It works quite well: the students are happy to be taught something they see as ‘relevant’, and while TAFE isn’t quite as restrictive at school it’s pretty sheltered and supportive. The courses that they do at school tend to be lower-level ones, I imagine, as these students have decided against Uni already.
I feel the material you are talking about really belongs at school, not TAFE. We can add to the cynicism of 15yos with a ‘How to lie with statistics’ course there, but I really can’t see how we can introduce such generalist material into TAFE curricula without alienating students who are looking for something ‘real’ and ‘practical’ because they aren’t that keen on the ‘irrelevant’ theoretical/conceptual material they get at school.