Lucas Hernandez
December, 9,
2013
Eng. 101
How Our American Education Must
Change
Our school curriculum is composed of
five major classes, Math, History, English, Art, and P.E., I have no doubt that
these classes are an important part of our culture and are necessary components
of schooling, but they are not a key component for an education. Students go to school, are barraged
with information, and go home to study and remember that information. The goal
of our current educational system is to mould students into a pattern to fit
the particular needs of our culture and society. Our educational leaders act as
if this system is an industrial process, that it can be improved just by having
better data. School should not be treated as an institution where knowledge is
forced into young minds; school should be a place for personal, social, intellectual,
and most of all personal improvement. Schools
must begin focusing on the individual student instead on the entire
institution. Our educational system must realize that teachers aren’t just
messengers meant to relay information; teaching is a creative profession that
mentors, stimulates, promotes and engages learning towards willing students and
classrooms.
Students are constantly skipping out on school, believing
that social life, sports, or drugs are more important. American author,
feminist, and social activist Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name 'bell hooks' author of Teaching
Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, states “Sadly, children’s passion for
thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for
conformity and obedience only.” Our educational system focuses too much on the
whole, forgetting that it’s the individual student that must be taught. Certain
students respond very well to monotonous tasks and worksheets; cell style
teaching, but a large majority of students need visuals, activity, and
excitement to get them involved and academically drawn. bell hooks also states
"Professors who work diligently to teach often become discouraged
when students resist. Yet when the student does learn it is a truly rewarding
experience for both parties." Our school system must begin showing
teacher's that it's alright to get involved with their students, to nurture
them in a fresh educational environment and to teach them that one-on-one
confrontation is a necessary component to successfully reaching a student.
It's clear that each individual student learns different than another. There
are all kinds of skill levels in every subject. For example, if you walk into
an art classroom you'll see one student hardly able to draw a stick figure and
you'll see another painting a masterpiece. You can also clearly see this in a
Math; certain students will be stuck in Algebra 2 even though their skill level
clearly surpasses this subject, when at the same time other students will be
forced into Algebra 2 without the appropriate skill level to complete the
class. Constantly you see similar outcomes
of both students; one will feel unchallenged and will not take the
class seriously, and the other will most likely be left behind and fail
the class. John Taylor Gatto, a school teacher for
over thirty years, observed the behaviors of students from the motivated to the
unmotivated. He is the author of Against
School: How Public Education Cripples Our Schools, And Why, he stated “Boredom
was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they
felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was
stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted
to be doing something real, not just sitting around.” Constantly teachers push
the same mandated work upon the students, whether they're ready for it or
they're intellectually beyond it. Without realizing it the teachers are
negatively impacting the students learning process and teaching them that their
individuality isn't necessary, and that they must push it aside to replace it
with meaningless information.
I believe that it is important for
teachers to get close to students, to ask them meaning full questions, and to
let them express themselves whether they're in drama class or taking calculus.
Instead of focusing on cramming as much material into their brains as they can
in a short amount of time teachers must focus on the material that really
counts, take time to get to know their students, and make time for the students
to socialize and get to know each other. bell hooks explained about her early
encounters with teaching "I did not take time to ask the students to
introduce themselves or to share a bit of information about where they were
coming from and what their hopes and dreams might be. I noticed, though, that when
I did make time for everyone to get acquainted, the classroom energy was more
positive and more conductive to learning." The problem is that every
teacher is given standards and quotas to fill in a certain amount of time,
they're taught to fill these quotas with information for the students to digest
and taught to make the students "regurgitate the information at the
appropriate moments" as bell hooks so well put it, but the teachers aren't
taught to save time to let the students relax and use the information they were
given for their benefit and relate it to their own life so that it truly turns
into something meaningful for them, instead of just some information necessary
to pass the next test or pop quiz.
Our educational system must accept that
every student has different abilities, regarding age, gender, and disabilities.
If our educational system decides to accommodate a large diversity of skill
levels, focus on the individual student, and let the students express
themselves not only will it benefit our graduation success rate but it will
also encourage students to stay in school and cause them to appreciate an
education as more than just a grade on a piece of paper, but as something that
you keep with you for years to come. We must create a climate for schools and
the teachers within the schools to flourish. Ken Robinson is an English author,
speaker, and international advisor on education in the arts to government, he
has supplied an amazing metaphor that I will conclude this paper with. “Not far from where I live is a place called death valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America. In the winter of 2004 it
rained in Death Valley. Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period, and in
the spring of 2005 there was a phenomenon... The whole floor of Death Valley was
carpeted in flowers. What it proved is this: That Death Valley
isn’t dead, it’s dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of
possibility waiting for the right conditions so come about. In organic systems,
if conditions are right life is inevitable. You take an area, a school, a
district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of
possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities,
and schools that where once bereft spring to life.”
“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
― C.S. Lewis
― C.S. Lewis
Words Cited
hooks,
bell. “Critical Thinking”. Teaching
Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. 8.
New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group. 2009. Print
Gatto, John.
“Against School: How public education cripples our kids, and why” Harper’s Magazine. September,
2003. Web.
Robinson, Ken. "How
to Escape Education's Death Valley"
Ted Talks. 2013.
Web.
