Isn’t School
Just Wonderful?
School
isn’t an option. Everyone says you have to go. The government, your parents,
your teacher, other adults, any adults, just about everybody. But how many
people actually enjoy school? Not many; that’s for sure, and certainly not me. I
tolerate it because I have to and because since I was a little kid I’ve been
told that I need to do well on my assignments, so I can get good grades, so I can
get into a good college, so I can get a good job, so I can make lots of money,
so I can have a good retirement and a successful life and blah blah blah. So basically
your grade school years are the most important of your life because they affect
the rest of your life. Does that mean that any kid that has ever said “school
is stupid,” or something along those lines, is wrong? No. they’re absolutely right.
There are lots of problems with the American school systems today. To name a few:
teachers simply teaching to the test rather than for the sake of learning
something, the large role of standardized testing, the lack of arts humanities
and physical education, the amount of work students have for all their classes,
the expectation that everyone needs to participate in an extracurricular
activity on top of all the work, the competitiveness and expense of a good
college education. All of which are rather significant problems in the school
system that make those kids absolutely right.
So
one of the major problems in the way people go about education today is that
many teachers don’t teach students the subject so the student will learn the
material and retain it. They teach the subject so the student will remember the
material long enough to take a test on it and forget what they don’t use for
the next test, when the same thing happens over again. As Ken Robinson says in
his TED Talk How to Escape Education's Death
Valley, the “culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and
learning, but testing,” and he’s absolutely right. Today in schools it is much
harder to find a student that’s worried about learning the material than it is
to find a student that worries about getting good grades. It has gotten to the
point that students simply want to get an A in a class so that they can move on
and can get scholarships and KEES money and whatnot. Part of this problem, which
Robinson talks about, is that “human beings are naturally different and diverse.”
So to follow Robinson’s theory, teaching to the test is really not successfully
teaching anyone anything. See that’s the thing with teaching to the test… in
another TED talk, Geoffrey Canada, says that most teachers use a one size fits
all teaching plan “and if you don’t get it, tough luck” which is exactly why
teaching to the test doesn’t work.
This also has to do
with standardized testing. This testing being exactly what it’s called:
standardized. Obviously. But that’s just it. Going back to what Robinson said
about humans being diverse, standardized testing should not play the large role
it currently plays because not everyone is good at the same things and so they can’t
all be placed on the same scale in all of the core subjects. The core subjects-
English, math, and science- being the only subjects on standardized tests are
as he puts it, “necessary but not sufficient.” He’s right when he says that and
he’s right again when he says, “Real education has to give equal weight to the
arts, the humanities, to physical education.”
Which moves into the
next major issue with the academic system. It’s much too focused on the core
subjects and pays too little attention to arts, humanities, and physical
education. Now there are several reasons this is a problem. The first of which
is that these classes could give students the opportunity to change the “one
size fits all” description but only if they’re an option given to the students.
The second problem being that not having students participate in any form of
arts or physical activity regularly means that they are just sitting at tables
listening to teachers “teach” for seven or eight hours a day, and who wants to
do that? Adding these classes would make it easier for students because rather
than sitting in a chair all day they could participate in more exciting
activities and so it would be easier to stimulate and engage them in other
classes.
The next two problems
with school systems can really be considered a part of one bigger problem. The amount
of work teachers give to students for after-school hours and the expectation
that to be seen as successful a student needs to participate in at least one
extracurricular activity add up to the one problem that all students have: time
and stress management. Going to school for eight hours every day is already
enough but then on top of that most teachers expect you to “spend about thirty
minutes on it tonight,” which is never only thirty minutes and that’s only for
one class. So somewhere between one to four hours of homework average, possibly
more, and if you’re lucky one day, less than that. To make matters even worse teachers
and parents and guidance counselors all tell you that you need to get involved
in at least one extracurricular activity to improve your college resume.
Marching band for example takes up about three hours a day for at least three
days a week plus all afternoon on some Fridays and all day on Saturdays,
leaving all practically no time for sleep, let alone any work. With all these
things to do teens are forced to attempt to manage their time as best they can
and try and cope with the stress because they have no choice. In Laci Talericos
article Young and stressed: Teens balance
work, school and more she explains how it is possible for teens to balance
everything outside of school but it can be at the sacrifice of sleep and a social
life. She asks seventeen year-old student Cory Scott about it and he told her,
“I already go to school for eight hours, but I also
have to go to work every day," said Cory Scott, 17. "I don't get home
until about 11 on work nights, and then I have to eat dinner and shower, so I
don't even start my homework until around midnight. Needless to say, it's
pretty exhausting.”
Which just goes to show
how all teens have too much on their plates with school, homework, and work or extracurricular
or both, going on at the same time, leaving no time for anything else.
And last but not least.
Actually probably the biggest problem with education today is the price and the
competition for college. Students go to school for their entire lives until the
age of eighteen simply preparing themselves for college and proving that they
are responsible enough and smart enough to be accepted into a good college,
hopefully, so they can get a degree and move on with their lives. The only problem
with that is that college is so expensive that if you don’t have some sort of
scholarship than you can’t go anywhere but your local community college because
otherwise you would spend the rest of your life paying off your student loans
that you needed to make the money you would still be putting into your
education so many years later. On top of that, even if you have the money but don’t
have a scholarship you have be the right kind of person and student that that
particular college is looking for because they have become so selective now and
if you don’t have the grades, the requirements, or even if you post one thing
they don’t like on social media it could change their opinion on accepting you
into their college.
So to recap the education
system in the US has such a high rate of failure because teachers teach to the
test, standardized testing plays too big of a role, the lack of arts humanities
and physical education, the amount of work students have to do outside of
school, the expectation of needing extracurricular activities, and the
difficulty in getting to and through college.
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