“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” the saying goes.
That same logic applies to education—it is impossible to make young people learn, simply by forcing them to go to school.
A mind must be actively engaged to learn. High school dropouts have made a choice, for one reason or another, to no longer participate in classroom learning. Just having them sit in classrooms for an extra year or two will accomplish almost nothing.
Such dismal prospects for success aren’t stopping some members of the North Carolina House of Representatives Education Committee. By introducing House Bill 188, they have revived a call for UNC’s General Administration to study a possible increase in the mandatory age of school attendance, from the current 16 to either 17 or 18.
Representative Earline Parmon, (D-Forsyth) one of the bill’s main sponsors, said that last year they asked the UNC system to conduct such a study. Since the universities failed to act, this year advocates of the policy are making their request official.
While it might seem harmless to conduct such a study (except for taking highly skilled and well-paid UNC staff away from more serious endeavors), there is one major problem. If the legislature’s members are considering such a policy, they might just pass it into law.
Proponents of longer compulsory education often cite studies that show that people who have high school diplomas have higher incomes than dropouts. And they need less help from the government, and spend less time in jail. Therefore, or so the reasoning goes, if the dropouts can be forced to stay in school long enough to qualify for diplomas, society can increase incomes and reduce dependence and social pathologies.
Yet this reasoning reveals a lack of understanding that is all too common among people in decision-making positions. It is not enough for disengaged students to receive a paper credential saying that they graduated from high school. There must also be an increase in their skill level and a change in attitude—otherwise the credential is rendered meaningless in regards to their future prospects.
Students who graduate from high school do so because they are more engaged, have better work ethics, follow the rules more regularly, have stronger family backgrounds, and have better aptitudes for academic work than those who currently drop out. Simple possession of a piece of paper by the current dropouts will not automatically raise their performance level and decision-making to equal that of the graduates.
In fact, it might even impede their maturation. After all, what has ten or eleven years in the public schools produced? In the case of dropouts, it has produced young people who want to leave school and try something else. They are tired of gaming the system to avoid getting in trouble while not engaged enough to perform well. They are tired of being stigmatized as slow learners, troublemakers, or non-entities.
It is almost an act of cruelty to demand that students who have performed poorly in school from the early years to age sixteen continue. They are locked in a place where they, and the rest of the student body, know they are slow to learn academically. It is simply human nature for some of their classmates to look down on them, and for them to suffer low self-worth.
There is also the effect these uninterested students have on their school in general. Students who are not engaged are more likely to disrupt classes, pick fights, and lower the general level of behavior. Forcing students to remain in school against their will is only going to exacerbate this—there will be a significant increase in every school in the population of bored students, many with behavioral or emotional problems. Adding more potential troublemakers to a high school is certain to have a negative impact in some manner.
Such students should enter the working world where they can contribute according to their abilities, where they are not stigmatized for their academic shortcomings but instead can feel the pride that comes with a steady paycheck.
The UNC Tomorrow Commission’s economic report suggested that there will be plenty of work for dropouts for years to come—roughly 40 percent of North Carolina’s future jobs will not require a full high school education.
The value of working, at any job, should not be discounted as a way to learn. It is easy to scoff at fast food jobs, but everybody has to start someplace (The author’s first job was as a dishwasher). Companies like McDonald’s have long figured out how to take sullen, alienated, disengaged dropouts and, in short order, turn them into polite, helpful employees who have their eye on moving up to the next level as a trainer or shift manager. Such companies would have a hard time with staffing if they could not accomplish that transformation. It is apparently not a process the public schools are good at—they had a hand in producing the sullen, alienated, disengaged dropouts in the first place.
Dropping out of school is not necessarily the end of education, but is often merely a hiatus. Many dropouts return at some later point when their attitudes, hormone levels, financial situations, or home lives have changed for the better. One example is the African-American economist Thomas Sowell, who left high school at age 17, bounced around the work force for several years, and entered the military. Upon his discharge, he earned his G.E.D., attended Howard University, transferred to Harvard where he graduated with honors, and eventually attained his Ph.D. from the prestigious University of Chicago. Today, many conservatives and libertarians consider him one of the nation’s most original living thinkers.
Rather than extending compulsory education, it might be better to have a “workforce preparation track,” with a different diploma. In this track, the final year for students who plan on leaving at sixteen could be spent preparing for immediate employment—teaching them such basics such as how to handle a job interview, how to fill out an application, how to read their paycheck so they know what the deductions are, workplace etiquette, and so forth.
Even if one agrees with the objective to keep children in school longer, this bill is made unnecessary by trends that are occurring naturally, according to the Department of Public Instruction’s Dropout Report for 2008 (link):
“In 2007-08, the numbers of students dropping out at ages 18, 19, and 20 increased, while the numbers of students dropping out ages 15, 16, and 17 decreased. This is the continuation of a recent trend of students staying in school longer before dropping out.”
The cost of increasing the compulsory age of education will not be cheap. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s Dropout Report for 2008 does not provide actual numbers of children dropping out at particular ages, only a comparative bar chart, so precise estimates cannot be made. But it would appear that, using statistics for the 2007-8 school year, roughly 6,000 children drop out by the age of 16 annually. The approximate cost per student is slightly more than $8,000. This translates to an approximate increase of $50 million across the state per year if the compulsory age was raised to 17. If the age was raised to 18, this would mean approximately $150 million more.
Of course, it is very possible, that once the students are forced to say in school, the state will discover that mere attendance is not enough. It will therefore institute expensive mentoring and tutoring programs, sending costs even higher. Perhaps, because of all the new jobs required, this bill should be called the North Carolina Association of Educators Full Employment Act.
Mandating compulsory education until age 18 is a serious coercive action, one that greatly limits freedom. There is the question of enforcement—will the state be throwing 16- and 17-year-old truants with gainful employment into juvenile detention centers for the crime of not going to school? When they are contributing to society by gainful employment? Instead of receiving a subsidy from society, which is what public school students do?
Our legislators should remember that education is a means, not an end. The objective is productive citizens, not feel-good legislation and empty credentials. If somebody wishes to actually contribute to society by working with their muscles at a young age, let them. This bill does nothing but take away an option that young people currently have to get a head-start in the work force, when they are no longer interested in “book-learnin’.” This big government, one-size-fits all, nanny-state legislation should be killed before it has a chance to grow.