[Vision2020] North Idaho Adult High School

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Friday 09 October 2009 14:53:23 Wayne Price wrote:
> I also think we are loosing [sic] a great opportunity here on the Palouse to  
> offer "education" to adult learners by not opening up the Universities  
> at night. We could very easily put together a night faculty and offer  
> quality education to those that want it at night, and not just in what  
> are considered "traditional" studies.

Yes, classes taught during evening hours are a good idea. Yes, there may be 
interests in, and markets for, classes in non-traditional subject matters. 
Yes, more, if not entirely distinct, faculty members than the present cohort 
would be required to succeed at offering many evening course sections.

These concerns are not the point of this message, because the recipients of 
most of these course-hours likely would be people already in the educational 
system in one way or another. The point of this message involves people who 
are not, but who would do better by being, part of an extended educational 
system. I am writing about adults who may have graduated, or perhaps they 
didn't graduate, from high school many years ago, and who have not continued 
their educations in the many years since leaving school.

I am writing about those adults who left high school 15 to 30 years ago, and 
who have 15 to 30, or more, work years ahead of them before they can or do 
retire. Those adults, often in families with school-aged children of their 
own, are likely earning wages and incomes considerably below average, and 
below the capabilities of those adults if they had up-to-date high school, 
not to mention, trade school or junior college, educations.

Societies change for various reasons, and with that change comes the need for 
changed education requirements. Thirty years ago the IBM personal computer 
did not exist. Twenty years ago the first pass through the sequencing process 
for the human genome had not been completed. Ten years ago the Soviet Union 
had not yet fallen. Each of these changes has had, and continues to have, 
large affects in the lives of citizens of many countries all around the 
planet. People who have not had any opportunity to study, or who have failed 
to take advantage of opportunities to study, these changes likely are not in 
as good a position to understand, to contribute to, or to take advantage of 
the newer opportunities evinced by these events. Such people are more likely 
to cause problems for others because of the understanding they lack.

What is needed for at least some, perhaps many, of these individuals is an 
opportunity to return to a school at the academic level of high school, but 
with the social level of adults. I suggest that this situation might be, in 
part, at least, remedied by a new high school, the enrollment of which would 
be limited to adult individuals over age 21 who have been out of high school, 
and likely outside any educational establishment, for some years. This 
institution might be a day school or a residential school or both, and it 
could be either publicly funded or privately funded or both, perhaps 
depending upon which part of the curriculum is being considered.

I think this community, in cooperation with the state, would do well to 
consider the establishment and a long-term commitment to a new educational 
institution called the North Idaho Adult High School, to be established for 
the purpose of providing high school education to adults who have not shown 
previously, or who can not now show, mastery of course materials and a 
curriculum sufficient to graduate from an accredited high school.

(And just to be explicitly clear about this: I am not writing about a cram 
school established just to allow passing the one-shot, one-exam, GED. Yuck.)


Ken