The United States Educational System: Part 2

As of suggestion at my fellow members of SoulPancake (click here to check it out), I'm writing a follow-up article for my last one. This one, rather than simply listing the problems, I will try to explain in detail both what students used to learn, and what we need to do to fix the atrocity we call school.

For example, take a brief section of my last article:

"Have you ever heard of a little thing called standardized testing? It is more or less one of the major factors in the downfall of sophisticated and effective education. Now, instead of teachers teaching students how to solve math problems, analyze literature, and deal with real-life situations, students are learning how to take a test."

I listed a problem. But, what I failed to list is what we used to have. As I said, all students are learning how to do nowadays is take a test, but we used to have students actually learn to tackle life's many challenges. Rather than filling bubbles, we had amazing engineers revolutionize the digital field, we had the many minds working the businesses, we had brilliant scientists (and more engineers) take us to the fucking moon! This was the era when America taught people to actually get things done. We were taught how to deal with real life issues, problems, and dilemmas. We were taught how to create, how to invent, how to innovate, how to solve, we were actually taught useful things.

But I think the most important thing we were taught was how to think.

Now, the educational system doesn't really encourage much thinking, spare a couple of extraordinary teachers. They just teach us how to answer a problem on a test, and like I said in my previous article, it all boils back down to money.

Now, rather than ranting (which I tend to do if I don't catch myself), I'll follow what I said I was going to do in the beginning. I'm going to propose a solution.

Rather than hours of mindless, pointless, bullshit-ridden brainwashing on how to take a test, we take a hint from the last couple generations. First, and most importantly, the schools will once again need to encourage individual thought. Rather than asking who was the antagonist in "To Kill A Mockingbird" (an excellent read, by the way), they should ask the students what they actually thought of the damn book.

This alone would re-establish a sound and logical means of proper education, but even though its better, its far from what we need. After we establish the encouragement of thinking, we can move onto the next step.

Burn the fucking standardized tests.

No good comes of the standardized tests. They poorly distribute funds, making rich schools richer and poor schools poorer, they've created a redundant means of teaching students, and by God, they've wasted so much money. Not to mention standardized tests are just that, standardized. This is yet another example of how the educational system seems to generalize and standardize everything. Despite what they may think, not every school is the same. There is no standard school. There are different people, different financial statuses, different educational levels, and different overall attitudes. So, why create a single test for so many different types of students? This logic is so stupid I can't think of a proper metaphor to ridicule it. So, after we burn the tests, we need to work on the teachers.

I have had teachers (usually in their 60's or so) who really just don't care anymore. They don't teach, they just throw notes, homework (another issue I'll discuss one day), worksheets, and (surprise surprise!) more standardized tests at the students. The only reason they still work there is because they've gotten to such a point that why leave the job they have where they're getting a liveable salary for some other job they'll only be working at for a couple years until retirement? Not to mention the schools can't get rid of them, even if they are horrible teachers, because of tenure. Tenure is just fine, but it needs to be employed to an extent. Don't lay off teachers during harsh economic times, that's fine, but fire their asses when you discover that they really aren't very good at doing something that might affect children for the rest of their lives.

Then, while we're at it, why not address all the backfiring anti-drug/drinking/smoking assemblies? They quite clearly do not work, yet they continue doing them. And, by damned, I've got a solution.

"...they waste thousands of dollars trying to show us these "cool" videos that usually consist of some douchebag wearing a baseball cap backwards sitting on a chair backwards saying 'Drugs are bad!'"

A little line from my last article. They need to stop doing what that very thing. Like I said, they don't work. But, despite all the failures they call assemblies, I have attended one (and just one!) actually meaningful drug assembly. It consisted of a mother coming on stage, describing what happened when her daughter began doing heroin. She showed a slide show of the slow deterioration that heroin had done to her little girl, and that actually impacted the kids. Instead of Mr. Douchebag in the backwards cap, we actually saw what this drug did to not only the user itself, but what it did to their parents. It would've been the perfect anti-drug assembly had some other lady not come on stage and start blabbing on and on about Kurt Cobain, which more or less reversed what the mother had just been saying. Showing us a completely awesome guy who did heroin? Didn't think that one through.

But if rather than wasting all this time on the Mr. Douchebag assemblies, and they focused more on quality than quantity, showing us assemblies with the mother-impact or actually bringing in a real drug-addict and having him tell us the troubles that heroin had caused him. If they did that, they're little dreams to keeping kids from doing drugs might just work. Then there's one final thing they can do to keep the meaningfulness of these anti-drug assemblies working.

Stop telling us not to smoke pot.

They're just beating a dead horse. Kids are smart, most of the time, and they know pot isn't very addictive if at all, you can't overdose, and it has a lower risk of cancer than cigarettes. If kids find out you lie about something, everything else you say comes into consideration of credibility.

At the moment, I can think of one other thing that might help us do better in school.

That's right, lunch. Schools tend to either lean to one extreme or another, throwing either frozen, unhealthy, and sometimes downright nasty school lunches, or trying to drown us in salads and fruits. Both of these extremes drives students to pack, which usually end up in less school revenue, which is surprising considering how much schools love their money.

I understand lunch ladies have to feed hundreds or sometimes thousands of kids, and sometimes frozen food or masses of vegetables are just so much easier, but there are ways of achieving a mutual ground. If some students from the local trade school are majoring in culinary arts, why not send them over to the schools to cook? Not only would they enjoy doing it, but they would actually learn how to cook in a real-world environment rather than just in a classroom.

And I just remembered one more solution! It's quite simple, just abolish the entire zero-tolerance policy. A Motrin should not be treated the same as heroin, stealing a pencil should not be treated the same as stealing a laptop or money, poking a kid in the arm should not be treated the same as a full-blown brawl. These generalizations simply confuse students. Like I said in my last article, these generalized examples simply confuse students. If students generalize just as the schools are doing, they already realize that Motrin isn't bad, so how bad could heroin be if they treat both of them the same?

So, to sum it all up, here's a little list:

• Encourage free thinking and expression.
• Burn the goddamn standardized tests
• Evaluate teachers and react accordingly.
• Institute meaningful anti-drug/drinking/smoking assemblies with real-world examples.
• Create a better standard for school lunches, because if a kid just solved a bunch of complex algebraic problems, they deserve a bit more than frozen pizza.
• Completely abolish Zero-Tolerance.

So there you go. Those are Saint Charlie's solutions for the broken US Educational System, all in a single article. Critique and berate as you will, but I've made my point.

-Saint Charlie-