> Ok, according to my English teacher (Who is prone to sarcasm, so this might be exaggerated, embellished or just plain made up, I dunno-if you know for sure then lemme know) high school was created during the great depression. Prior to the great depression, you went throgh 5th grade or so, and then you worked. During the depression, you had full grown men who needed jobs to feed their families, and you have families that could put 8 kids in the workforce for cheaper, stealing jobs from the men who needed them. Therefore, the government created middle school and then high school as a place to stick kids so they'd be out of the workforce.
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>Now, how useful is it to have high school? Are there many jobs out there that requires a high school education, but nothing else? (I'm not talking high school diploma. I'm talking if you haven't been through 4 years of high school, you can't do the work). Should we stop making high school required and have kids that want to pursue high school and higher education go and the rest enter the work force after middle school? Discuss :)

The reason the school leaving age was extended in Britain from 10 (in 1880) to 16 (in 1947) was to reduce the number of people looking for work, and thus keep the unemployment figures down. So, it's not unreasonable to assume that similar concerns applied in America.

As to whether or not any job calls for a high-school education, I think that each student (and the country as a whole) benefits from the general grounding that such education gives; people entering the workforce will have a good literacy and numeracy, civics, history, geography and a dozen other subjects that, while perhaps not immediately relevant allow people to make better informed choices. It also provides an arena in which people can try a dozen different subjects without any real economic pressure and decide what suits them best. It also keeps people out of the job market until they're too old to be easily abused by their employers. Consider the situation in places like south-east Asia, where child labour is the norm.

Them there's the fact that, at the age of 10, it's far harder for someone to decide if they want to go on to higher education, or if they're suited to it. Add that to the economic pressures face by many poorer families who won't see a strong benefit from putting their children through 5 or 10 years of elective education, and the number of people attending university would drop, perhaps drastically. A worst-case scenario would have a massive shortage of doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, ninjas, engineers, teachers... any job that requires education.

The bottom line is that I think education for its own sake is a good thing, and the current school leaving ages in America and westen Europe are probably about right, as they allow a solid grounding in everything you need to know to be a productive student, but don't overly tax the less academically able students. Though a more vocational stream teaching manual skills and things of more immediate use in the work force might be an idea for such people, in the last few years of school.

winter"discussed"mute