Secondly, why do students go for long periods of time during the school year without using all of their essential skills? Thirdly, why is there the notion that after high school graduation people do not have to use their academic skills to be able to retain them? Why indeed.
It is my contention that the reason some high school graduates cannot read, write coherently or do math to an adequate level is not because they have not been taught these skills. Rather, students have allowed these academic skills to degenerate.
The students are victims of “forget time,” the gap between being able to use a skill and the subsequent loss of the skill. The measure of forget time presumes that if a skill is not used in a certain amount of time it will be lost. Naturally forget time is not the same for every student, some lose their skills in days, some in months. Importantly, everyone on Planet Earth will lose their skills if enough time passes without the skills being used.
Summer vacations are harmful to students since most do not continue to use their academic skills. When the students come back to school, the first two months are really just getting back to where the students were before the summer vacation. What a waste of academic time.
Year-round school, which only gives three weeks of vacation at a time has a better chance to avoid forget time. The benefits of three months off are: janitors can leisurely wax the floors, teachers get summer jobs or return to college and parents can send kids to relatives. Many students work on their tans and sleep to noon.
Producing academic ability in students is said to be the main reason for public school and yet we let the student’s academic ability erode each year. Likewise, a common complaint against the public schools is that students graduate without any academic skills. Students are taught to read, write and do math by sixth grade but then little by little they are allowed to go for long periods of time in the next six years without using those skills. During some semesters the students are not required to read in depth, write on a weekly basis or perform any mathematical calculations.
The reason for letting students go without writing in depth each week is said to be that teachers feel they do not have time to grade all of those essays. Perhaps they are right, but what is important is that the students find themselves years later without much writing ability. At the time the students are glad to slack off these tasks since writing, reading and math are uncomfortable subjects. But how much fun is it to be turned away by employer after employer because you had too much fun in public school and not enough time was spent holding on to academic skills?
Finally, at graduation, students are told in glowing terms that since they have graduated they have achieved a great wisdom. The implication is they are finished developing their skills and no longer have to use these skills regularly. Many high school graduates believe those graduation speeches and feel they have all of the wisdom they will need.
The truth is they will achieve wisdom when their kids graduate from high school and not before. Their high school skills have a shelf life, like bread has a shelf life. They must use the skill regularly to retain those skills. If, at age 25, the former students lack skills, most often these skills were lost from lack of use rather than never having been developed.
When that happens people ask, “Why didn’t those darn schools teach them anything?” The answer does not matter. Whether they had those academic skills and then lost them for lack of use or never had those skills, it is all the same in the end.
Dr. Michael Swickard is co-host of radio talk show News New Mexico 6 to 9 a.m. Monday - Friday on a number of New Mexico radio stations and through streaming. Email: michael@swickard.com
