Aug 25 2008
Day 3…Education
Are education standards where they should be in the 21st century?
Absolutely not, I’m just going to touch of the surface of my views because this is a very general question. I think education in this country has become like so many other things; a great concept that is taken too far.
Higher education in this country used to be a privledge and an amazing accomplishment…now it is simply another step in becoming a contributing member of society. This is ridiculous. I don’t think that college is right for everyone and I don’t think it should be as important as it has become for many jobs. Not everyone should be able to get into college and college should be a challenging four years at the end of which, a degree is EARNED and not paid for.
Additionally, I think we are asking way too much of students in younger grades. It is no surprise to me that so many students are falling behind and being classified in schools. I am a recent college graduate, and and I returned to a second grade classroom a few months ago only do find the class doing triple and quadrouple digit multiplication problems . I was still working on memorizing my times tables in fifth grade with the rest of peers.
We need to stop having unrealistic expectations for students, and in higher education, we need to stop caring about getting a check and start caring about students earning their degrees. We have so many students passing from year to year and still, so many uneducated people. Something is wrong here!
One Response to “Day 3…Education”
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Some thing is definitely wrong, and it is with much of your conception of education. In many countries, elementary level students are learning what our middle schoolers are being taught. I have seen work from high school students that looks as if it was done by a fifth grader. I know intimately of what I am speaking because my wife is a teacher who has worked at every level from elementary to high school, and she also teaches special education.
The problem with the schools is not the standards it is FUNDING! Try to teach students without BOOKS, and you cannot help but fail to bring them up to any standard. Spend half of a class period looking for a light bulb for your overhead projector (because they are not in your school budget) and how much time will you spend with your students?
One of the schools where my wife has taught had five or six brand new computers in every class room with nice comfortable rolling chairs at each. At this same school she had to go to Borders to purchase, with her own money, resource material so the students would actually have something to read and reference. When she could not buy enough she had to make copies; copies on a machine that had a preset quota of how many sheets of paper she could use for the year. A school where the clocks were not wired into the school electricity so the teachers were required to put batteries in them. So, why not have the students just read on the computers? Well, despite the fact that they had a broadband connection, there were so many filters on the network that it was next to impossible to access anything. I was unable to access a free online resource for teachers that offered lesson plans. There was nothing in the school budget for pencils, or post-it notes. My wife worked almost every weekend, and I went with her because I would not see her otherwise.
At her current school district the administration spends thousands, if not tens of thousands on an internal email system that is basically unusable by the majority of the teachers, because their computers belong in a museum, so the top administrator can sync his phone and his PDA to his email. Meanwhile they cut half a million dollars from the school budget this year, and her school is slated for closure next year.
The solution is NOT to say that educating children is too hard so we should set the goal lower, the solution is to make it possible to put the goal in reach by supporting teachers and students. The only thing that comes form tailoring goals to performance is a steady decline in quality.