Requiring high schools students to choose a “major” is a popular trend, especially in the South, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The idea is to persuade students that what they do in high school relates to the rest of their lives.
In the case of Florida, students in every district must choose one of 443 state-approved majors, ranging from forestry to fashion design. Mississippi and South Carolina enacted similar pilot programs this year. Similarly, West Virginia and Louisiana require students to choose an area of concentration, according to Jennifer Dounay, a policy analyst with the Education Commission of the States in Denver.
It’s too soon to tell whether high school majors produce students who are more engaged and successful. And it’s controversial.
“This is a colossally bad idea,” says Debra Humphreys with The Association of American Colleges and Universities. . . . businesses are telling us that the jobs that today’s ninth-graders will eventually have don’t even exist yet and that the specific training needed for technical professions is changing rapidly.”In a survey of business leaders, the association found that rather than desiring specific technical skills in students, employers in the global marketplace are most interested in good communication skills and analytical thinking.
I doubt that most today’s ninth graders will be anti-gravity architects or nanocryogenesis technicians; there will be a place for nurses, police officers, accountants, plumbers, etc.
The problem is not overspecialization. It’s overpromising. In most programs like this, the specialties are vague, require the same set of communications and analytical skills and teach no specific technical skills. In Florida, student who picks fashion design at 14, can switch to teaching at 15, law at 16 and business at 17 and then go to college and major in chemistry.
It takes a lot of work by teachers to design meaningful majors that engage and focus students. It’s impossible for every school to do it for more than a few specialties.
Requiring every student to major almost guarantees students won’t be committed to their majors and specialties won’t be very special.
Forget “high school majors.”
I’d just be happy if the high schools would make an effort to be sure, I mean REALLY sure that students can read at a reasonable level, write a coherent paragraph, do math (again, to a reasonable grade level), and have some understanding of history, science, and geography.
Because I am tired of having to re-teach basic math to my college students. And I am tired of papers turned in that are grammatical nightmares.
Also…teenagers might not know what’s best for them. “Fashion design” SOUNDS like tons of fun, but how many people with an interest in that area actually wind up working in the business? (When I was in high school, I wanted to be an author…then I wanted to be an interior designer. Didn’t wind up as either, but I did wind up with an interesting career that pays well.)
I’m kind of on the fence on this one. While it’s probably true that most students won’t wind up in the field they are “majoring” in, the act of having a major might lead to an increase in their interest in school. Someone who isn’t interested in math in the abstract might be interested in math as applied to auto mechanics or fashion design.
I doubt, though, that it would be easy to find enough teachers who have the requisite knowledge of the fields. How much expertise in forestry, fashion design, or auto repair exists on a typical high school faculty?
My sense is that most high school students, and even college students, have a very limited knowledge of what careers are out there and what is require for entry/success in those careers. Maybe there is some way to transmit this information without actually going so far as to declare a “major.”
My interests during high school revolved around math. Would not have been a problem for me to declare a major there. College, now, that’s a different story. Math, physics, psychology–then I dropped out. Later went back, but in engineering.
In Brazil we used to have something like that(They called that Technical highschool), where you majored as technician in some area.(I majored on Data Processing, but I didn´t worked in the area).
That was dropped because politicians complained that students didn´t worked on the areas that they majored. I think that was good.
School systems already have dedicated schools to the health and medicine tracks and art tracks. I can’t see a student who changes their mind about one of those “majors” in any worse position that a student who changes their mind about other “major”.
However, I think the school system’s idea is not just to educate the kids in forestry or fashion, but to let them set a goal and see how other classes they normally wouldn’t care about play into their future. Setting a goal other than just graduating is empowering to students – well, if only in their minds.
I would hope that any teacher who is in charge of a speciality class like fashion, would view it as an opportunity to teach students about the real world, not just draw pictures of clothes.
Anyhow, I’ve read that only 10% of college grads work in a field related to their major.