Preparing to prepare

College prep has become a very popular term for high schools. High schools typically last four years, and college programs frequently target four years. Personally, I have never been a fan of expecting students to spend four years to prepare for a four-year program.

It gets worse. Some people refer to K-12 schooling as college prep. If you think that's bad, some people feel that the later years of middle school should prepare students for high school. In other words, middle schools are supposed to prepare students to prepare for college. As someone who believes that education should be a fluid process, preparing to prepare drives me nuts.

You could expand this concept. Elementary school could be viewed as preparing students for middle school. Kindergarten is frequently viewed as preparing students for first grade. We are now pushing for transitional kindergarten, a grade created to prepare students for kindergarten. We are preparing children to prepare to prepare to prepare to prepare.

The primary goal of an educational system should be to educate. You don't need these transitions to disrupt the process. If you try to maximize the quality of education from the beginning, the implications of transitions need to be minimized.

This bizarre approach also fuels linear learning, a concept that I openly oppose. Students have a predetermined path to progress through the system. College is considered more advanced than high school, high school is considered more advanced than middle school, and so on. This effectively has schools determining the order in which learning should occur. Students are highly variable, and the order of learning should not be dependent on progress through the system.

Let's stop preparing to prepare. Instead, let's focus on maximizing the quality of education. This includes embracing more educational fluidity and support for different students to pursue various forms of learning at the times that are appropriate for them.