by Joseph Wardy

Created on: December 28, 2009

This perspective is written as a retired high school teacher who also taught as an Adjunct Professor for sixteen years at four New Jersey colleges and two years full time as a Management and Marketing Professor at a Catholic college. From my experiences, enclosed are five reasons high schools fail to prepare students for college:

1)  The periods spent in  high school are largely of a lecture format creating a passive student looking to take notes that will be regurgitated back to the teacher. This education fails to allow for the development of inquiry through questioning. Critical thinking skills are not cultivated.

2) As a college professor, I also cringed at the inability of students to think conceptually or with their right brain. This is attributed to the fact that again students are looking for information that will produce the right answers necessary for a high grade. There appears to be very little challenge for students to think creatively and with the whole in mind.

3) A quality high school education in our culture is largely a result of measurements through letter grades and results on standardized testing. Students look superficially for high grade and not the quality of the learning and its practical application. Students want good grades without producing that standard of excellence. Our education system looks continually for the instant gratification of looking good  without balancing that perspective with the importance of lifelong learning.

4) Many students graduate with minimal writing skills. Frequently, students confuse the power of power of quality with the academic requirement of quantity. Students, from my experiences, are not taught clarity and conciseness. Often, I have observed convoluted sentences of greater than fifty words that can reworded in twenty or twenty five words.

5) Some high schools teach public speaking which still allows students to read their speech. I have given many projects requiring a presentation which does not permit  the use of the podium and reading of the speech. Presentation is the direction employers require of employees requiring the skill of standing up and delivering their material in a skillful conversational manner.

The five reasons stated here are a microcosm of students who are simply not ready for the rigors of a true and challenging college curriculum. This is attributed to the easy standards of graduation from high school as fifty percent of graduates of New Jersey high school are enrolled in remedial courses.

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