American High School Culture Essay

According to the Los Angeles Times article written in September of 2016, Allen High School in Dallas, Texas spent $ 60 million on a football stadium. The same Allen High School, according to U.S. News, ranks 1,543 among Texas high schools. This is just a recent example of the overarching problem with America’s high schools. This problem stems from the domination of extracurricular activities, especially sports, to the detriment of academic culture, the ultimate purpose of American secondary education.

Bard College president, Leon Botstein, argued that American high schools’ artificial culture of brawns over brains is also prevalent in the faculty of many of the same high schools. This lack of quality in recruitment and training of secondary educators is why, Botstein argues, “… that the curriculum and the enterprise of learning hold so little sway over young people.” Although Botstein sums up the root cause of the problem with America’s high school culture, too much time and effort are put into sports instead of the academics. I disagree, however, with his conclusion that the modern high school must be completely changed. I would argue that the method used by Union City, N.J.’s school district is a prime example of having academics come first.
I was a part of something bigger than myself; going to the state tournament was the only thing that mattered. I noticed in the last month of school that my grades had slipped from A’s and B’s to B’s and C’s. I began to notice all of the homework that I was missing in my Algebra II class. I can now see in hindsight that I had been enveloped in the culture of the modern American high school that Botstein described. If I was a part of a larger public school, I would have probably have fallen through the cracks and failed. I was lucky, but many other students don’t enjoy the same advantages that I do at Holy Trinity