<p>I know that every high school graduate in New York has been taught about the first amendment because they meet it in two required courses. The problem is that they don’t retain the information. I don’t see that taking the course again in college really solves the problem. </p>
<p>I’m undecided on the subject. I think my older son learned the basics in high school, and he reads widely. His education was 99% computer science, math and physics courses. While it might be nice if he’d taken a lit course or two, I don’t think he’d have appreciated them. Basically he gave himself a European style education thanks to attending a university that is generous with AP credits.</p>
<p>My younger son has more varied interests and a college that will only accept five of his APs and has all sorts of rules about how you can use them. His interests (International Relations, Nuclear Disarmament, The Environment) are already rather inter-disciplinary. I don’t think he needs to take another US history course. He’s learning tons from what he IS taking.</p>
<p>I like the fact that we have choices. You can do great books at St. Johns, or the core at Chicago, or a British style education (with enough AP credit) at CMU.</p>
<p>According to a IB May 2010 statistical bulletin there were about 56,000 IB candidates from the US and there’s about a 78% pass rate. There’s about 3.2 million high school graduates per year in the US. So less than 2% are getting an IB education much less a diploma.</p>
<p>I like choices too. People should study what they want to study, and not what some biased LA Dean wants them to study, ostensibly to become better citizens.</p>
<p>I am in a major metropolitan area and never heard of IB before coming on to CC. It’s incredibly niche. But frankly, so are a lot of the other things that are mentioned on here like USAMO, Intel, etc. They are common in a relative handful of privileged high schools and off the radar screen for the vast majority of the country.</p>
I’m not sure when the change occurred. I just read a (very Western-centric and biased) book that talked about development of the university system in the 13th century. But it is true that early European universities emphasized an undergraduate liberal arts education.</p>
<p>I’m a high school student. I recently took one of the civics surveys that they offer to college students and got a 93%, which I attribute to the fact that I just took AP US History. Next year my score would probably go down, as it would the year after that, and it would probably go back up if I took a US history or government course in college. The scores will be a function of how recently students took such a class, so colleges that require those classes will probably do much better.</p>
<p>That said, students’ specific knowledge will still atrophy after a few years. Taking a required course doesn’t mean you’re going to remember it for life, so requiring those courses does not necessarily prepare better citizens in the long run.</p>
<p>“So less than 2% are getting an IB education much less a diploma.”#22</p>
<p>I think the stats you are citing don’t include kids who take IB classes, but don’t take ALL classes to receive the Diploma. However, they do receive IB certification in the individual class.</p>
<p>“I am in a major metropolitan area and never heard of IB before coming on to CC. It’s incredibly niche.”#25</p>
<p>I think not. You’ve never heard of it. It speaks to your knowledge, nothing more.</p>
<p>When reviewing the schools, I find the information on various schools is basically flawed. I compared a school that says that composition and foreign language is not required, but looking through the handbook, it shows that both those profieicencies are required by graduation. The difference is that the composition is handled through a writing-intensive freshman seminar (comp is only for those that score poorly on placement and SAT/ACT) and foreign language proficiency can be satisfied through testing.</p>
<p>In regards to ‘joke’ science classes:
Personally, as an IR major, I’d love to be able to tack on some good instruction on the physical ways in which the universe works. Heck, I think I got a good start in HS with my IB Chemistry and Biology classes. But as far as I can tell, there are two classes of science courses; ‘joke’ ones, and weeder courses for majors in that subject. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much in the middle. </p>
<p>Being in the “ancient lineage of the learned and wise” which Mr. Lewis seems to casually dismiss is actually one of the big things I want from my education. I want to be a well-learned person who has at least an introductory understanding of how all different aspects of the mind and the universe are. However, it’s challenging to do this when what I have to choose from is courses geared towards leaning out the class of incoming science majors and courses aimed at students whose only desire is to meet their distribution requirements.</p>
<p>The IB Diploma has you covered if you took the required classes. I know kids who take college pre-med physics who claim high school IB physics was more challenging.</p>
<p>Only too true. But schools which force kids to take a year of “Rocks for Jocks” (geology) or “Physics for Poets,” “Think Green” or similar courses do a better job of educating students than those which don’t, according to Professor Lewis. He’s wrong, IMO.</p>
<p>My D hates science–absolutely HATES it. D had to take two science courses. Took a broad, introductory course in environmental science. The class had two textbooks. She never BOUGHT one, let alone read it. Class met 2x a week and had a section once a week. She never went to lecture; she did go to section and made a point of talking a lot. Got an A --and had the third highest grade on the final. I KNOW how little work she did, so I can’t imagine how little work most of the kids in the class did. </p>
<p>I saw the final and saw red. It was easier that the final in the required environmental science unit she took in 7th grade. I said that I wasn’t paying big bucks for her to take silly, easy courses. She had to take a REAL science course for her other science credit.</p>
<p>Then a wonderful thing happened. A biologist and a philosopher team taught a course in the ethical issues raised by the Human Genome project–yes, this was a few years back. You could get either humanities OR science credit for taking the course. If you wanted science credit, you had to take and pass a mid term and final written by the biologist. For philosophy credit, you had to write a philosophy paper as the midterm and take a final exam written by the philosophy prof. </p>
<p>Yes, the focus of the class was narrow, so it would flunk Prof Lewis’s “quality” test. I assure you that the biology component of the class was at a much, much higher level than the intro to environmental sciences class. My D learned a heck of a lot about human DNA and its sequencing. She remembers much more from the class because the science that was taught raised ethical questions and how a society sets ethical norms is an area of special interest to my kid. </p>
<p>From what she said, the class discussions were amazing. There were all these sciency kids who would have been bored out of their minds in an introductory philosophy course reading Descartes who really appreciated the chance to study ethical issues that they could see themselves actually facing. And there were all these humanities kids and social studies policy wonk kids who learned enough science to actually understand what was at stake. These were kids whose paths rarely had crossed in the classroom. </p>
<p>Now, this kind of “narrow” class is just what Prof Lewis condemns. The introductory environmental science course is one he includes on his list. </p>
<p>Switching gears, Brown and other schools with no core requirements get criticized as “easy.” But, believe it or not, more Brown humanities students take REAL science courses than at most other schools. The difference is they take them S/NC–Brown speak for pass /fail. Because they CAN take them pass/fail and if they fail they just don’t show up on the transcript, they take REAL science courses. Maybe not the hardest science courses, but they at least sit in the intro science courses with the pre-meds–and know that doing so won’t hurt their gpas. Any day in the year, I’d rather have my kid take a REAL science course on a pass/fail basis than take a “joke” class and get an A.</p>
<p>So, I just don’t accept Lewis’s reasoning. IMO, we should encourage kids to take classes in other fields, but we should do it in such a way that kids are allowed to take courses that have relevance for their interests, not broad introductory courses for which they will have forgotten 90% of the course material within six months of the final.</p>
<p>Your comment was equivalent to saying that because only 1% of students attend an Ivy,
since you have never heard of Ivy Schools, they are a niche market. </p>
<p>I also commented in #28 that the 2% mentioned didn’t include students who took some IB classes but didn’t receive the full diploma. Those include many more students.</p>
<p>There are also the IB Programs that are highly selective - many more students apply than attend. That also implies that the limited number of IB diploma holders is not because IB education is unknown.</p>
<p>I could really find how many students take some courses. IRCC (I’m not going to look for it again) there were about 12,000 IB schools in the country. Which means on average only 5 or 6 students per school are graduating students with IB diplomas.</p>
<p>I agree that it’s annoying that your choice is often killer courses or dumb ones. I took a real Physics course many years ago as it was required for grad school - there were two big problems with it. One was that it was full of pre-meds, but the second one was that they had designed the curriculum basically assuming that you’d learned some things in the standard Chem course pre-meds took that I had not. I’d been doing very well until I hit that part of the course. I did fine, but not as well as I had hoped.</p>
<p>It is the attitude of the students I believe that turns them away from Math and Science. I have no idea how anyone can’t be amazed by this universe. It just blows my mind. Honestly, what kids really need is imagination. I mean even simple things such as water and light bulb blows my mind. No, I am not mentally disabled, but I do see things at such a deep level that it astounds me. Just imagine the electrons colliding with the atoms making them shake and exiting the electron of the atom into a higher state then emitting a photon. Just astounding. Keep an open mind and you will be surprised what can blow your mind.</p>
<p>I’m sorry but some of the data this person used for the rankings is incorrect. I punched in Swarthmore and it says that there is no math requirement? There is a math requirement. You have to take 3 humanities classes, 3 social science classes, and 3 natural science classes one of which must be math. In addition, you have to take at least three (?) writing classes. For some reason the only requirement it states Swarthmore has is science.</p>
<p>David, I love your passion, but you are not keeping a very open mind here. Some people just don’t like the sciences. That’s OK. Similarly, some people don’t like the arts. That’s OK too. The key is to do whatever it is you love with full commitment, and never judge the commitment of others.</p>