194 Teaching Minds
are needed in college into the hands of the high schools so that the university professor’s life is easier and involves less teaching that he doesn’t want to do.
So, of course, professors want high schools to do a better job. The question is why high schools should care about what universities want at all. High schools have their own problems, or should have, but they have been convinced to ignore their problems and focus on the prob- lems that universities have.
Parents demand that high schools prepare their kids for college, which really means help them get into college. Gradually the high school curriculum has become one giant entrance test for college. The idea that someone might not want to go to college seems very odd to most people. So, if the colleges say more math, then more math it is. But colleges are not saying more math in good faith. They are just hav- ing high schools teach what they don’t want to teach.
But there are about 3,000 colleges in the United States and only about 50 top-tier research universities. What Yale needs may not be what the other colleges need. Why, then, is the tail wagging the dog? Yale says jump and everybody asks how high. Yale sets the rules. Yale says 3 years of math, and 3 years of math it is, even though higher math will not, or at least should not, come up in most college classes.
Does Yale know it is doing this? Do the faculty understand that by requiring that the high schools teach mathematics, they are caus- ing massive numbers of dropouts and making learning a very stressful experience for most high school students?
I think the answer is no, but even if they did know it, they would do nothing about it. They have a university to run and they simply cannot change the way they operate. I can explain this with a story, this time from Columbia University.
I once had the opportunity to create courses for Columbia Uni- versity that would be put online through a business I started that was funded (and then abruptly terminated when the dot com boom busted) by venture capitalists. I interviewed various professors at Co- lumbia in order to decide which courses to put online. I wasn’t trying to simply copy the courses they had but was trying to build learn-by- doing versions of them that would be more engaging than the usual lecture course and would try to teach real-world skills rather than the usual stuff one gets in an introductory course.
We decided to build an economics course and talked at length with the chairman of the Economics Department. We decided to simulate
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