Leon Botstein's Let Teen-Agers Try Adulthood
Uploaded by CaseyP on Apr 09, 2017
Teenagers and Adulthood: An Annotated Bibliography
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Teenagers and Adulthood: An Annotated Bibliography
Botstein, L. (1999). Let Teen-Agers Try Adulthood. Nytimes.com. Retrieved 29 March 2017, from http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/17/opinion/let-teen-agers-try-adulthood.html
In the article “Let Teen-Agers try Adulthood,” Leon Botstein argues on the need to abolish high schools because he thinks that they are obsolete in nature. Botstein sheds light on the cons of high school and the way in which the American education system has been established. He argues that high schools fail to prepare students, who are normally teens, for the real world experiences. Botstein wrote the article based on the occurrences such as the famous Littleton school shooting. From the statement “the rules of high school turn out not to be the rules of life,” it is clear that Botstein thinks that what is taught in high school cannot be compared with what goes on in the real world. Besides, Botstein argues that high school teachers do not have the experience to teach the teens on the life lessons that are vital in the modern world. He proposes that “elementary school at age 4 or 5 and end with sixth grade, entirely ban the concept of the middle school and junior high school, beginning with the seventh grade, there should be four years of secondary education that we may call high school. Resulting in people graduating at 16 rather than 18.”
Botstein is a renowned scholar who is well conversant with the challenges undergone by high school teens. In his book Jefferson’s Children of 1997, he proposed that high schools ought to end after tenth grade. The students would then proceed to college level studies at the tender age. The book was a premonition to the article which was written two years later in 1999. Upon writing the article, Botstein was the president of Bard College. The Bard umbrella runs high schools in combination with the early college programs. It means that the article is reliable because Botstein has amassed experience while dealing with high schools and college teens. It can be deduced that Botstein spent most of his time writing this article as a means to expose high school ordeals to the world. According to him, high school is about sports and fame. Once a person is through with high school, there is no favoritism and popularity. The shootings helped the world to see what was happening in the education system. The...