A lot is said about how attending a bad school can lower what students who are assigned to such schooling expect of themselves. Ellen Kagan attended a public high school in New York City that did quite the opposite: expected its girls to excel. An Associated Press article today describes how the US Supreme Court justice nominee attended Hunter High School where presumptions of intelligence and the ability to achieve were strong.
When we gripe about schools having low expectations of students, we are inclined to opine that at least some of the kids would have risen higher in their careers if more had been expected of them at school. Not much achievement is expected of Martin Luther King Jr. HS students. If Ellen Kagan had attended King HS — like Hunter HS, located in Manhattan where Ms. Kagan grew up — would she have achieved as she did at Hunter HS and risen through significant government and academic assignments?
Hunter and King are both New York City Public High Schools. Hunter taught Latin when Ms. Kagan attended; King did not teach Latin. Now, in the era of handschooling, a student can learn Latin online — for example from a Beginners’ Latin free National Archives tutorial.
An online tutorial not only makes the study accessible for students enrolled in schools that do not offer Latin. Something else happens that makes the school irrelevant to the confidence of the student. Online knowledge does not artificially increase or diminish the confidence of its students.
Where public schools have blatantly high expectations for students — or the opposite like King — young minds are easily confused and their expectations can be unrealistic for real world careers. Schools judging and putting their stamp on students is unfair. It surely holds some very smart kids back — and undoubtedly has caused others to expect to accomplish more than they can.
