A couple of weeks ago, I was called down to the main office (code for principal’s office) during class. Considering the rocky history I have had with him, mainly from the fact that (on multiple accounts) I had been called into his office alone and without notice to discuss the status of my contested Young Americans for Freedom chapter with him and the second most powerful man in the school, his assistant principal. I was considerably jumpy by the time I had arrived at the door, but to my great surprise, I had not been the only one summoned. I, along with 6 other peers, had been recognized as a National Merit Commended student, which means on the 2024 PSAT (otherwise known as the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test), I scored among the top 3% of test-takers in the nation.
Along with the good news the principal (unusually, in my experience) presented me with, came a feeling of joy, of accomplishment, and of satisfaction. I had earned a 1410 out of 1520 on the test. I didn’t study that hard and I surely wasn’t as academically inclined as the 6 other students that I was sitting around the conference table with. Although it was a relatively laid-back visit to his office, I still left about 20 minutes later in deep thought about the condition of our nation’s political and social fabric.
Though you may feel compelled to dismiss this as a simple case of imposter syndrome, I ask that for this short time, you attempt to see this from my perspective.
This sentiment is commonplace in the modern academic landscape. I did not deserve that award. The test was simply easy enough for me to score well on. If anything, I am a thief who coveted the special feeling of outstanding academic achievement from my peers who probably studied more than me, who worked hard for the (undoubtedly) higher scores they likely received. Thanks to lower standards, this was yet another award that a greater share of students have been able to achieve.
The academic rigor of the public school system has, overall, gotten astronomically easier in the most recent decades of schooling. It is no longer an exceptional feat to have a GPA that exceeds 100. Overly-inflated grades now replace academic rigor and a commitment to hard work and dedication.
Essentially, the system makes it easy for kids to fly through their school years without a care in the world. The endless safety-net-oriented structure of makeup tests, abundant homework and extra credit assignments, and inflated GPAs makes commitment to a meaningful education a mere suggestion, not a requirement.
Of course, it was always a possibility for schoolchildren to simply not care about their academic wellbeing. Whether it is a group of 40 children in a one-room schoolhouse whose ages range from 5 to 15, or a group of 20 8-year-olds in a modern elementary school classroom, there will always be one or two kids who couldn't care less about their education. The difference between these two groups, time period aside, is the fact that the kid who did not care in the schoolhouse would be forced into improvement or cast out of the classroom altogether, not supported and enabled on his journey of ambivalence. On the contrary, I’ve personally seen this happen many times with an increasing population of kids who could care less about their character or performance in the classroom.
In a recent interview with Miranda Devine, Republican candidate for Ohio governor Vivek Ramaswamy shared his passion for education reform, a term stolen and weaponized by the Left. It seems like common sense to disallow children from graduating third grade (again, at the age of 8), if they do not demonstrate reading proficiency, so why is this not the case?
The fact that high school graduation rates continue on their path to 100% while basic arithmetic and literacy proficiency rates have fallen astronomically should be enough to send Americans into deep thought about the institutions they send their children to 5 out of 7 days of the week.
Nothing is prestigious anymore. The idea that there are no academic disparities between a child who has read the entire Harry Potter series by the second grade and a kid who has yet to read a book independently by the third is baked deep into the culture of the modern school system. It’s one thing for students to be separated into reading groups in elementary school that are named after different fruits as opposed to ordered letters (already correlated with grading) in the name of avoiding the children in a Group A from feeling superior to the kids in Group D, but it is another when the teachers themselves begin to see the role education must play. In reality, no student deserves acceptance into groups like the National Honor Society, or in my case, the National Merit Program, yet students who don’t meet the standards of such a group should deserve it even less.
This is no attack on lower-performing students. I know many well-intentioned and kind-hearted people who simply are not good at sitting in class, listening to information, and regurgitating it on a test a week later. School is not everyone’s forte, but the problem lies in the system’s effort to make everyone feel like they “belong.”
Only decades ago, as I believe some of my audience may be able to attest to, students could get into the most prestigious name-brand schools with an SAT score in the 1300s and a GPA in the low-to-mid 3s (when counting on a 4.0 scale). It was simple. The SAT was considerably harder to score highly on, and the grade inflation was considerably less. Selective colleges had to raise standards as they were lowered by other institutions and, with increasing levels of applicants, this led to an exponential drop in the acceptance rates of schools like NYU or even Harvard. In a class of 300 kids, it was rare that 75 were admitted into the National Honor Society. Today, out of my class of around 300 students, a staggering 133 are members of the NHS. Across the nation, the Honor Society has grown to 1.4 million members.
It’s perfectly fine if a student does not rise to the standards that “prestigious” organizations and awards call for. This only causes them to learn to accept reality and put extra effort into finding what they are good at. It should not compel the organizations to lower their standards, or the surrounding education system to lighten up the academic rigor.
Years ago, our country set a goal of making school accessible to all children. We believed in the right of the child to pursue happiness, and recognized education as a necessary step on that journey. Today, our country is on a mission to make high school graduation accessible to all. We have now shifted to believing that, as I have written before, the child has a right to happiness itself. This is where we went wrong.
High school graduation, and all other honors that come with it, should be accessible, but only to those who work for it. This is simply another manifestation of the siege that liberalism has laid on our society.
Too many times have I witnessed (and actively witness today), students saunter through high school. Teachers (who often have no choice but to do so in the first place) enable cheating, lackluster deans waive strict punishments, and students take advantage of the all-to-numerous easy routes out. I am not firing a warning shot. The lethal blow may already have been dealt by entities more powerful than I. I aim to ring the warning siren once more. School board election enthusiasm has fallen while illiteracy has skyrocketed. Students across the nation are forgotten about by both the system, who has made it its job to spread and strengthen this practice, and the parents, who have abandoned school involvement for overtime pay and extra lounge-time. I regret leaving this on such an incendiary note, but this is more than just an indictment. This is a cry for help. I remain committed to this issue, as I believe every responsible citizen should be.
Add comment
Comments