At any rate, some of my readers know that I am an English major. Not many of them know that I aspire to be a teacher, specifically, a teacher abroad. I'll blog about that another time but I felt mentioning it it was relevant to the topic and might give you some sort of an idea of where I'm coming from here or why I even care. I'm very disturbed about the lack of actual education that our system provides to date and I think it's going to have a very strong impact on the world of the next generation.
Grade school is public daycare. I dare you to argue that, in fact, I triple dog dare you to - comments are enabled so feel free to challenge it. Anyone with a high school education knows that outside reading and arithmetic, grade school learning is busy work to bide time for mommy and daddy to finish their shift at work. There are 3 major contributors to the reason to back that claim.
A. Staying Current - In college, we buy a new book every semester. It's annoying and probably not as needed as every 6 months but with every edition there comes new information that updates the texts that we learn from so that we aren't learning inaccurate or incomplete facts. I remember in grade school, going to the book shelf in the room and picking a book to use for the year. A half dozen names or so inscribed in the front. 6 to 10 years of children learning the same information without amendments for new truths and discoveries of old fallacies. I shutter when I think of the nonsense they tried to teach me in "Health Class" and how I now everyday read articles on Yahoo! or Reddit that illustrate how science has proved this or that fact wrong in the past or not as relevant as we learned it was. Public schools don't have the funding to stay current. I guess that it doesn't matter that much when we're not teaching from text books because we're too busy teaching from test books. More on that in another blog maybe.
B. Censorship - There are a great deal of reasons for censorship ranging from religious conflicts to being just too complex for a young person to understand and even just too gruesome or dire of an event to be taught in classrooms. Grade school History is a complete and utter waste of time. You spend most of your time in High school history classes unlearning or correctly learning everything you thought you already learned in grade school. Then in college, you learn that there are even more cracks to fill and that in all reality even the History we learn isn't accurate because it's all just interpretation of events of the benefactors of the historical events.
In my opinion this is a HUGE problem and should be rectified immediately. While more and more people are going to college there are still more and more kids not finishing High school. That means more and more people are running around with a cursory knowledge of things which are completely/mostly inaccurate or just not at all completed as an actual fact. How many American's do you suppose would say that Christopher Colombus was the first man to discover America? I don't have any hard facts here but I'd be willing to bet that you'd be very shocked at how many actually do think that. Too many people don't finish their education, or don't continue into secondary education for us to allow as much Censorship in the topics we are teaching at school.
C. Applicability - As tragic as it is that we can't provide the funding we need to stay current, as depressing as it is to know people go through life with confidence in false or partial teachings, I have to admit that the worst of it all is the fact that we just don't learn things we need to know. By and large, the majority of education up to college and even some there within secondary education is just wasted time and resources. There is no applicable use for a grade school students knowledge of the Boston Tea Party or even the details of the Revolutionary and Civil war. As important as that is to our society to preserve and propagate our history, a child is just never going to apply anything he knows of those things to his present or immediate future life. If you don't use it, you'll lose it.
There's a reason why the only thing my parents can remember from school is how to read and perform basic math functions. They are smart people and it's not beyond them to learn and use more complex things in life but the fact of the matter is that their life doesn't require more complex things and likely never will. They have no applicability for any knowledge past basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Here's another sad reality: Most people don't. Most people are in the same boat. Most people pick a single trade or skill and learn it, master it, and use it every day to make the money they need. A general education isn't useful to them, sad as that may seem, it's not by their choice but by the reality of society and how it works.
I'd like to think that one day our young people can be in a class room that teaches them literacy and problem solving skills but moreover increases awareness *and interest* in the variety of skills and trades the world needs today. I'd like to picture a school system that you send your kids to in order to get ready for life on their own and the ability to make decisions towards their chosen professions instead of being looked after while you go to work. I sincerely hope we begin offering an education in life, how it works and how to navigate yourself through it to get where you want to be, rather than a general cursory knowledge of a conglomerate of random facts taught only for the purpose or retaining the funds needed to keep the doors open. Above all else though, I hope for a system that teachers can be apart of that helps them make the difference they wanted to make when they decided to be teachers. We have to stop letting the people with the money teach, and start letting the people with the desire to teach teach.
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