Final Paper #3

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

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.