speech - Kyle W

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.