Complaint: The high school term paper is near dead

I feel quite confident in saying that on the college side there is the expectation that students will learn at least the rudiments of a research paper while they are still in high school, and college humanities professors are routinely surprised (slow learners) when they find that this has not happened for their students. 

Creative writing now rules at the high school (and earlier) levels in many cases. The director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard College has said she thinks in fact that high school students do not get enough chances to write about their feelings, relationships, anxieties, hopes and dreams and that they really shouldn’t be pushed to work on history research papers until college. The National Writing Project at Berkeley, which teaches hundreds of teachers how to write about themselves each year, teaches a postmodern approach to what they call “literatures” (their quotes) and never comes within a mile of considering that students could use some work on their research skills or their nonfiction expository writing.  

I have actually seen what high school students can do, and it is more like the following excerpt from an essay published in the journal (more examples are at http://www.tcr.org)(2015 current average length 7,400 words): 

This passage concluded an essay written by a Junior in a public high school. She went on to major in civil engineering at Princeton, got a Ph.D. in earthquake engineering at Stanford and is now an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell... 

“As is usually the case in extended, deeply-held disagreements, no one person or group was the cause of the split in the woman suffrage movement. On both sides, a stubborn eagerness to enfranchise women hindered the effort to do so. Abolitionists and Republicans refused to unite equally with woman suffragists. Stanton and Anthony, blinded for a while by their desperation to succeed, turned to racism, pitting blacks and women against each other at a time when each needed the other’s support most. The one thing that remains clear is that, while in some ways it helped women discover their own power, the division of forces weakened the overall strength of the movement. As a result of the disagreements within the woman suffrage movement, the 1860s turned out to be a missed opportunity for woman suffragists, just as Stanton had predicted. After the passage of the 15th Amendment, they were forced to wait another 50 years for the fulfillment of their dream.”

The final point is that high school kids are fully capable of writing long serious history papers and they will get a lot out of doing so, both in reading nonfiction and in learning to write nonfiction. These days too many students are not being given the chance, and colleges continue to have to do what they see as remedial work in nonfiction expository writing.