High school literature classes are a waste of taxpayer dollars

My senior year of high school I had to take an English class. As part of this class I was required to write a play. My question is: Why did I have to write a play to graduate high school?

The purpose of public high school is to teach young people how to be productive members of society. What does writing plays do to advance that goal? I believe it does very little.

Teaching high school classes isn’t cheap for the taxpayer. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average teacher in the United States makes $55,000 a year.

There’s also cost in the time spent in the classroom. Any amount of time spent in class can’t be spent in another class. This is called opportunity cost. Teaching four years of literature classes takes valuable public resources away from much more important classes.

If I were to ask the average 17-year-old kid what the basic plot of “Romeo and Juliet” is, he or she could probably tell me because it’s considered one of the most important classics of all time and is therefore taught in most high schools around the country.

If I were to ask them, however, about the basic processes by which a bill becomes a law, the function of the Supreme Court or the powers granted to the President by the constitution, many of them would have no idea.

This trend varies from state to state, but in most states, high school standards for civics are very low, which you can find out for yourself by looking at the standards on teachinghistory.org. Democracy doesn’t work unless its people understand the system under which they live.

We have now a situation where the population doesn’t understand it, and it’s because of wasteful classes in our public high schools. We spend money and time on teaching them about how to analyze literature and poems when we could be teaching them more history or civics.

This isn’t to say some English classes aren’t important. A common mastery of the English language is necessary for productive members of American society. That means all English classes should focus on composition and grammar.

English classes should be used to teach students how to communicate effectively in the written language. The critical thinking and grasping of abstract concepts can be learned in the pursuit of more practical knowledge like history.

Analyzing a historical event requires the same skill as analyzing one of Shakespeare’s plays does. In the upper levels of secondary education, literature classes are no longer useful to society.

The aim of public high schools is to educate young people to make them productive members of society, and they fail every time a young person has to take an English class that spends time analyzing literature when they could be learning about something useful like civics or history.
buy orlistat online https://healthcoachmichelle.com/wp-content/languages/new/online/orlistat.html no prescription