Argumentative Essay On High School

In our era of society, high schools are nowhere near perfect and are in need of being improved to help students for the future. From reading Botstein’s article and two previous ones, it’s clear that the major idea is that high schools need to be fixed. Incorporating some aspects from Botstein’s ideas, we can fix high schools by integrating students together, improve the quality of teachers, and inform students about the importance of high school in their adult life. A problem with high schools is the difficulty in integrating students because different cliques box certain students into specific stereotypes. In Botstein’s article, he mentioned how certain cliques have influence because of “good looks and attractiveness, and sport prowess”.

When approaching this issue, Botstein suggests that we should “entirely abandon the concept of middle school” because 16 year olds are mature enough to make their own decisions and live in the adult world. The problem with this idea is that at age 16, a lot of teenagers still don’t know what they want to do in the future and need those 2 extra years to mature and to learn exactly what they want to do. Some students don’t take high school seriously because they aren’t well informed about the impact high schools have in their adult life so, they decide to not put in a lot of effort to focus on their education. But, if students were to learn about the importance of high school, then they would become more motivated to try harder and be able to mature quicker. If we were to inform students that high schools graduates had an unemployment rate of 19.1% in 2010, and the only way to get a job with decent pay is to get a college degree, then it would help motivate kids to take high school more seriously (Ellis). When students are more informed, they’ll mature more quickly because they know what will happen if they don’t try in high school and how that will affect their future life when they become