DISCLAIMER: I know that I received a phenomenal education from Pre-K through 12. However, not all students are fortunate enough to experience that. I am a full supporter of teachers and education which is why I'm writing this; I believe that as a whole, we are cable of teaching and learning so much more.
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Thirteen years: from the time I could begin to function as a normal human in society (i.e. walking, talking in complete sentences and not going to the bathroom in my pants anymore) until the time I was legally an adult, I was plunged into the scam that America calls an educational system. I was taught the ABC's and 123's just as I was taught that your grades define you. I was told that I needed to learn cursive in second grade because I'd use it in third, yet when I got to third, they told me I needed to perfect it because I could only write in it when I got to fourth grade. My fourth grade my teacher, though, laughed and said "You don't need to use that for what we do here." That may have been the end of my cursive crusade, but only the beginning of learning things I would never again use in my daily life.
Regardless, I bought into the system. I worked hard; I did my homework and made my flashcards and put my education as my first priority. I finished third in a class of over four hundred students, behind two of the most brilliant people I will ever come across. We were academic champions, all four-hundred-and-some of us, yet we graduated without knowing so many things.
We didn't take “How to Love Someone 101” or its counter class “How to Forget Someone 102.” We weren't taught how to survive failure, or how to humbly accept success. The curriculum didn’t have room to teach us what to say when someone is crying on your shoulder, or how to fix a broken friendship. We were not tested on our ability to brighten up someone’s day, or graded on confidence and perseverance.
I left not knowing how to do my taxes, but I knew how to graph the absolute value of x. I couldn't make a resume but I was damn sure I knew the year Versailles was built. I couldn't tell you the names of my state's representatives or what happened in 2008 to crash the market (and how it still affects us today,) but I could tell you the names of all the characters in "Great Expectations" and the motifs throughout "Great Gatsby."
I wasn't taught many of the things I needed in the real world. I would be OK with that if I knew that even though I didn't know how to write a check, I was not only at the top of my class, but at the top of the country – at the top of the world. But, we all know America's education system is not nearly top.
The problem starts in the middle schools, where everything is easygoing. Every once in awhile you come across a teacher that actually cares. They'll push their students and encourage them to look beyond the curriculum and truly learn, not just memorize information for an exam. But that one teacher is not enough to reverse the damage done by the others. It's not enough to stop the laziness that comes from never having homework or never being challenged. One teacher cannot change the ways of a generation being taught that hard work is for the nerds because you can put in the minimal effort and still see A's and B's on your report card. Yes, the problem starts with the middle schools, but it doesn’t end there.
I know far too many students who are just writing their first properly formatted, properly researched paper as juniors in high school. As a freshman, I was writing five page research papers in biology. The fact that as juniors in high school, one of the most important years of their pre-college lives, they are more than just a little behind where I was at their age completely blows me away.
The laziness they become accustomed to in the middle school years transfers into high school and the discrepancy among teachers' styles and goals only exacerbates students' drive to just get by. You get one teacher who teaches very slowly, doesn't push harder than necessary, and covers the bare minimum curriculum. The following year, you get a teacher who now must struggle to play catch-up with the kids while trying to teach new topics and prepare them for the next year or upcoming standardized test. When some of the teachers put furthering critical thinking on the back burner, the rest have to work their butts off trying to undo damage that, at this point, simply cannot be undone. If all of teachers, from high school down to Pre-K, could come together and agree that it's better to produce smarter, critically thinking kids than students with all A's from easy classes, the students entering the workforce or college after graduation will be immensely more prepared. It's better to give the kids as much as they can handle than allow them to settle for less than they are capable of.
Post Secondary education in America also has its issues…
I went to college because a well-paying job is virtually impossible to obtain without a degree. My parents aren't divorced and make just enough to get by, so I did not receive any tuition breaks (in retrospect I'd rather pay a little extra than face the alternatives). Unfortunately, I was smart, but not smart enough to get scholarships that actually significantly affected the cost of tuition at the schools that offered me them. In the end, I would be stuck taking my full tuition out as a loan that will cripple me with debt for decades all because I wanted to earn more than minimum wage.
This is NOT how an education system should be. You'd think a country that is 35th out of 64 countries in math and 27th in science, according to the Pew Research Center, would want better students and more people going to school. You'd think we would be flushing money into more school supplies, more teacher training, and more scholarships and tuition breaks so students can receive a better education as well as a more realistic financial opportunity. We need to realize that we should stop teaching so many unnecessary things and make time for real world lessons. Maybe then when kids get handed a diploma, it will mean something more than that they can solve an algebra problem and pass some state mandated exam. You'd think that America, the self-proclaimed "greatest country in the world" on many occasions, would actually strive to be great.
Instead we focus on just getting by. We are forced to teach to the test and not to the real world. We stop challenging and start dumbing things down. We stop asking for more and start accepting less. We stop focusing what the kids actually get out of a class and keep focusing on the number on a piece of paper at the end of a year.
News flash: When you're applying for a job after college, they're more interested in your skills, critical thinking abilities, and leadership qualities than they are about the GPA on your diploma.
Education molds the future of our country, but with the way the education machine cranks out graduates today, our future isn't looking so bright anymore.
