maybe it's a good time to dust off my idea about how to fix the education system, which is...

more high school.

yes: i want four extra years of high school.

it's a different spin on what sanders was saying, if you actually listened to it, which is that we're up against what is really a failure of public policy. you can't get a job washing dishes without a college degree nowadays - unless you're an undocumented worker willing to work at half the legal wage. what sanders was really advocating for was an expansion of the public education system, just as what he's advocating for in healthcare is "medicare for all" - an expansion of an existing program.

i've been arguing this point for a really long time, though. sanders has a few decades on me, but he was a kind of distant novelty candidate for me until 2015, as he was for most of the left. you'd see him on left-wing talkshow once in a while as the oddball from vermont; he always made sense, but he wasn't projecting a clear platform like he has been since.

but, there's a social component of it, as well. four more years of high school would normalize a broader understanding of certain topics. the way they teach physics in high school is a disaster, and you don't really have the space to get as broad of a basic education as you should. i took eight oac classes - which was unusual - and i didn't have time to take law, economics, accounting, history or even geography. the eight were calculus, algebra, finite math, chemistry, biology, physics, english and computer science. is that really good enough for what we call "general education"?

so, four more years of high school would normalize a deeper understanding of some basic life skills; four years is really not enough, as evidenced by the number of people that are going to university. the assumption would then be that most people would enter the workforce after their eighth year of high school, rather than go to what would now be called post-tertiary education. only specialists would go to tertiary schooling. this would allow the universities to be more selective in admission, and more focused on research.

you could argue that you're expanding adolescence by four years, but i think that's a benefit - it's giving people more time to figure out what they want. if there's a root cause to the student loan crisis, it's in trying to force 18 year-olds to plan their lives out. that is what is crazy about the whole thing.

"and, then they expect you to pick a career...."

four more years of english would open up more space to focus on more classic literature. four more years of basic science would help us create better public policy, by being more science literate. four more years of arts would help us grow ourselves at an important period of our development. and, understanding how to program in multiple languages - as well as perhaps to speak a few - is something that everybody should know how to do.

you would fund these four more years of high school the same way you'd fund the four that exist right now. and, while that sounds expensive, it probably isn't, because you'd be transferring over so much of what we pay for tuition. the administrators would have to take a pay cut, certainly - they'd be paid like principals. many professors may even get a raise, to the level of high school teachers.

over time, the system will staff itself, emancipating the necessity of research professors to teach undergraduate level courses.

as mentioned, the trade-off would be very high requirements to get into what would be a much smaller university system that is strictly focused on higher level topics and research.