A psychology course should be mandated for all high school students in the US.

The Pro thanks the Con for a prompt response and will rebut his arguments. == Main points== The Pro would like to extend his previous assertions. First, the Pro described Transactional Analysis, a different flavor of psychology. The Pro also described how mandating that high school students learn TA, body language, and other fields would help in the fight against prejudice and would also increase personal relations. = The Con's points== The Con previously made an argument saying that psychology should only be taught to ROTC students and students who have trouble controlling themselves. The Pro simply stated in response that psychology must be taught to all students so that the entire youth would be able to fight discrimination and bond effectively. Next, the Con has argued that "High schol students simply cannot grasp psychology. In fact a small percentage of teenagers pay attention in school nowadays..." and that it "should wait till college." == The Pro's rebuttal== -First, the Pro will concede that high school students have a short attention span, namely about 8-14 minutes. (1) However, high school lessons have been designed in a way that their attention span not interfere with their ability to learn. The Pro encourages everyone clicking on source 1. Therefore, their attention span will not interfere in their ability to learn psychology. -Second, the Pro would like to point out that 69.2% of high school students graduate in the US.(2) These students have shown that they have been able to sufficiently learn a variety of other subjects, including math, science, history, and English. This should prove that they are able to learn required subjects, so they should also be able to learn the required subject of psychology. -Third, waiting until college means that a huge chunk of the youth will miss this education. The high school drop-outs who don't make it to college would not make it to the course. However, a much bigger group of students would miss it for another reason: the existence of private schools. The US government does not have the ability to mandate anything for private institutions, only for public ones. Therefore, anybody at Harvard, Yale, Rice, Amherst, or any other private school wouldn't be mandated to take the class. There are about 2441 private universities in the US, as opposed to 1699 public ones. (3) That means that only about 41% are public. Under the Con's suggestion that psychology be mandated in college instead of high school, the Con would affect about 41% of the youth. The Pro will go ahead and account for the presence of private schools that occur before college. There are 48,755,772 students currently enrolled in public schools (including elementary and middle school) and 5,376,604 students enrolled in private schools. (4) That means that about 90% of the youth will go through public schools before college. Therefore, mandating that psychology be learned in high school will reach about 50% more students than the Con's proposal of mandating in college (although I realize that there is some dissimilarity between the statistics, so give the 50% a +/- 10% or so). -Fourth, Transactional Analysis isn't your standard stuff. TA is different from other branches of psychology in that it is designed to be extremely easy to comprehend and utilize. "One difficulty with many psychoanalytic words is that they do not have the same meanings for everybody. The word ego, for instance, means many things to many people. Freud had an elaborate definition, as has nearly every psychoanalyst since his time; but these long, complicated constructions are not particularly helpful to a patient who is trying to understand why he can never hold a job, particularly if one of his problems is that he cannot read well enough to follow instructions... The vocabulary of Transactional Analysis is the precision tool of treatment because, in a language anyone can understand, it identifies things that really are, the reality of experiences that really happened in the lives of people who really existed... Training programs... in a ' "public" language, decontaminated of technical jargon and suited to the discussion of universal problems in our society' is being made possible today by Transactional Analysis." (5) Therefore, TA will be no setback for high school students. The words used (Parent, Adult, Child, OK, NOT OK, games, stroking) are already in their vocabulary. == Basically== To condense all 4 points, there's no reason in postponing a psychology course to college because 1) High school students will understand it just as well. And 2) Waiting until college will mean that a lot of students will miss the course and not learn it. The Pro welcomes any new Con arguments. (1) http://www.videojug.com... (2) http://www.csmonitor.com... (3) http://www.infoplease.com... (4) http://www.localschooldirectory.com... (5) Harris, Thomas A. "I'm OK-- You're OK: A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis." New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.: 1969. xiv-xvi.