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Anderson Chung

The Necessity of High School for Adulthood


Writer Leon Botstein talked about how “The American high school is obsolete and should be abolished in his New York Times article, “Let Teenagers Try Adulthood.” The word “obsolete” may carry similar meanings and implications to words such as “outdated” and “useless.” In other words, Botstein believes that the high school system in the United States is in the old and should be replaced by a new one. His solution was to move the time of high school backward and allow children to enter the “real world” at a younger age rather than completely eradicate the system as the claim in his opening paragraph may suggest. However, I believe that Botstein’s stance is flawed as it fails to recognize and acknowledge the benefits of high school life, including helping them prepare for maturing into adults and figuring out the path of their futures.


High school is the time when adolescents truly become mature adults, and it helps prepare these young people to undergo that process to get them ready to enter society. To remove that process is to remove the mediator between adolescence and adulthood, which may be a dangerous solution that can affect a child’s growth. The real world can be a serious and dangerous place, and high school is a very useful tool for students to adapt to estranged environments and learn to interact with other people. It essentially creates a smaller simulation of what the real world is like and helps children slowly go through that process. When Botstein writes how “[adolescents] need to enter a world where they are not in a lunchroom with only their peers, estranged from other age groups and cut off from the game of life as it is really played,” he is completely ignoring the fact that cases of bullying, mistreatment, and ostracization can still occur in workplaces or other locations in the “real world” very often. Does he really believe that putting these immature children whose mindset of the world is not yet fully developed into society could help reduce the cases of such unfair acts? Botstein also gave the example of how “The Littleton killers, above and beyond the psychological demons that drove them to violence felt trapped in the artificiality of the high school world and believed it to be real,” in which he implies the high school environment led to the school shooting. While that is true, the argument remains flawed as he fails to recognize how many (more) cases of such violence occur in the real world mainly due to the accessibility of arms in the U.S. It is not the inherent responsibility of high schools that these incidents happen, but simply a trend exclusively within the country. If we were to release these impressionable and undeveloped children into the real world, it would only worsen the situation. If a child can not withstand the pressure of being in the environment of a high school, how can one expect that same kid to withstand the pressure of the cruel and unfair real world?


Furthermore, high school allows students to try out and explore new interests and studies that they have not really thought about before as kids, which builds their character and helps these children decide what they want to do for their futures. Botstein writes about how “by the time those who graduate from high school go on to college and realize what really is at stake in becoming an adult, too many opportunities have been lost and too much time has been wasted.” But without high school, teenagers wouldn’t even have the time to look at all those available opportunities and assess which path is the best they should walk into in adulthood. High school is such an essential process for children to figure out and experiment with what they like or do not like in a smaller environment to prepare them for joining the real world. Additionally, education is such an essential part of high school that it would be a crime not to mention it; education is extremely significant for allowing students to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge for their future jobs. Boltstein mentioned how “the curriculum and the enterprise of learning hold so little sway over young people,” which fails to acknowledge the massive impact high school education had on our lives. Literature taught us how to read and write properly, algebra allows us to think cognitively and apply math in the real world, history allows us to learn from the past, and many more. High school is a time to learn about what we want to learn and chase what we are interested in. A software developer cannot code without the time to learn computer science, just like how a doctor cannot succeed without the opportunity to be interested in and indulge in the subject in his younger years. High school is so important to give students time to really think and reflect on their lives and future that removing it would be a huge disadvantage for truly developing an individual’s potential. Botstein claims that “at sixteen, young Americans are prepared to be taken seriously and to develop the motivations and interests that will serve them well in adult life,” but adults shouldn’t rush the process of their children’s decision-making regarding their futures. Students shouldn’t be forced on a path about which they didn’t have time to truly think about and decide, but instead be allowed to discover themselves first using the time of their high school years.

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