Send Your Boy to Grade 10 ½

Among students enrolled in university, Grade 13 graduates report higher grades in university and satisfaction with their program and do not transfer out of their programs compared to Grade 12 graduates. These findings highlight the importance of an additional year of high school to produce better prepared and more satisfied graduates. From Faria Sana and Barbara Finese: “Grade 12 Versus Grade 13: Benefits of an Extra Year of High School”

I’ve come to the conclusion that Canadians are in some respects more highly evolved than Americans, including in their approach to education. For decades, millions of Canadians attended a fifth year of high school, known officially as “Grade 13.” The program was ultimately phased out in the late 1980s, but not because it wasn’t working. On the contrary, and as concluded in a study by Faria Sana and Barbara Finese, students who attended Grade 13 programs had more successful and fulfilling transitions to universities. So why are we rushing our kids off to college, when so many of them aren’t ready for the intellectual, social and practical challenges?

For many kids, the high school years are a frenetic and stressful series of credentialing exercises. In an effort to build superhuman level admissions profiles, kids are forgoing activities that are interesting and fulfilling in favor of ones that look good in an applications package. There’s little time left for unstructured socializing or experimentation or soft failures. Heaven forbid the elite college applicant reveal to his prospective university that he is, in fact, human! 

There’s growing awareness of the benefits of a gap year for those that can afford it. My kids can barely get out of bed without repeated morning wake up calls. And I don’t blame them. The typical teenager in our community spends 6-8 hours a day *after school* participating in extracurriculars and managing a crushing high school workload. They are completely and totally exhausted. There’s a paralyzing fear of going off course that has led to historically high levels of depression and anxiety among teens and college students. I wake up every morning wondering about the best way to slow it all down. For some kids the gap year is about exploration or working and saving money for college. For others, it’s recovery from the traumas of high school. 

For many, the college admissions march starts on the first day of high school (or even sooner). But for everyone who covets university admission 11th grade is the real killer. It’s the year that the majority of kids take their college boards - a process that for many requires significant time investment in studying - and it’s the most important year grade-wise from a college admissions perspective. If you are fortunate enough to have a child that is extremely well organized, and mature, and self-directed and focused, it’s possible that your involvement in the process has been limited. But if you have a boy, a significant amount of parental intervention may be required to keep things on track.

Go to the parenting section in any bookstore in America and you’ll see shelves full of books on the general theme of the arrested development of boys. Whether framed positively (for example, The Wonder of Boys) or negatively (for example, Boys Adrift) there’s growing consensus on a developmental and neurobiological level that boys’ brains develop significantly slower than girls’ brains. This has visible and invisible implications in the classroom. Boys tend to have more trouble sustaining attention, and have dramatically higher rates of diagnosed ADHD and significantly more difficulty with basic executive functions including organization, long-term planning and impulse control. I personally believe that we as a society have pathologized the natural developmental course of the male of the species. But I also wonder whether we’re just asking too much of our kids too early.

A lot changes in a child’s life in the course of a year. We’ve all seen incremental (and, in some cases, miraculous) improvements in our kids’ abilities to function in school from one year to the next. I’m a big fan of the concept of grade 13 (or a gap year). But in the age of the college craze, where small missteps can have big implications, I wonder whether we don’t need to press the pause button sooner. By 10th grade, most boys are pretty well into puberty. Although they still have years of brain development left, they’ve moved past the horrible and awkward and confusing middle school years. 

The benefits of an extra year in the middle of high school are obvious. It’s a period of explosive brain growth for all kids. That means better focus, more stamina and, for a lot of kids, better self-awareness by the time they reach 11th grade. Grade 10 ½ would give kids another year of courses in which to expand and refine their academic interests before committing to a course of study in college. Even better, colleges could continue to require only four years of grades, making kids less worried about intellectual experimentation and reaching. The evidence on Canada’s grade 13 program is compelling. Kids that have an extra year of maturity before college tend to be more academically successful, stick with their courses of student and graduate on time. College has become a very expensive choice for American students. And I think that with the benefit of extra time a lot of kids would make different, and better, choices about their futures.