Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice Spring 2013 (6:1) 69 Education and Learned Helplessness William Matthew McCarter, University of Texas-Arlington Federal, state, and local governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars on developmental education because so many students are underprepared for higher education. There are myriad ways that students are often academically underprepared for college, however, students often put themselves at a disadvantage when they leave high school and attend college because they fail to understand that there are very profound differences between the public education that they have and the higher education that they are seeking. This is especially the case for many of America's community college students who feel that they are going into the 13 th grade and not that they are attending one of America's institutions of higher learning. After nearly a decade of teaching in higher education, one of the larger problems I see in terms of education is how "learned helplessness" is cultivated in students in many of today's secondary schools. One of the ways that high school teachers fail their students is by giving those students too much support. This "support" is what helps to cultivate "learned helplessness." While I would agree that both high school teachers and college and university professors should give their students the support they need, I believe that high school teachers go too far. However, I can't say that high school teachers are entirely at fault. I think that they are only responding to the demands of standardized testing in American high schools. Because of the high stakes testing that has accompanied the NCLB legislation; high school teachers cannot allow students to fail these exams. As a result, instead of providing students with problems to be solved, these high school teachers are forced to tell students what they must learn. This, in turn, becomes the baseline for what students consider "learning" to be. Because of the demands of high stakes testing, high school teachers must summarize the main ideas of the texts that students should