Education for Everyone

	Students and teachers beware! The virus of apathy is spreading through our schools. It roams the halls radiating from weak-minded unmotivated youths. Infecting our teachers and students, killing off the inventors, writers, and scholars of tomorrow, the deadly state of apathy is a man-made plague caused by the cohabitation of the dull and the sharp and creates a mix of substandard scholars and overachieving dropouts. The citizens of America were sold a lie in the 19th century that set forth the establishment of a system that strips power away from the inquisitive minds of youth and places it into the heads of those who cannot empower themselves. We have long lived under a notion that modern schools have the capability to educate all children through standardized public education and have done so without considering an individual’s drives, goals, and basic capacity to learn. And at this moment, schools are filled to the brim with more students than ever. But, upon close inspection one can see that the students graduating high school have not retained any basic knowledge. In order to keep graduation rates up, over time we have adopted a system to keep slow students from failing, and inadvertently forced the future great minds of America, down to the same level. The modern school’s focus on a slow and equal education for everyone is stunting the intellectual growth of extraordinary students and forcing them into normalcy.
	Before the education system used today, Horace Mann dreamed up, in “from Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1848”, a solution to help shape the youth of this nation “…against the giant vices which now invade and torment it, - against intemperance, avarice, war slavery, bigotry, the woes of want, and the wickedness of waste…” (111). Mann’s vision for “the common school” was a dream for a universal school that would unify all people, regardless of background, by means of education (110). This grand vision was a breakthrough at the time. But, as explained by John Taylor Gatto, with its Prussian origins, the common school, in practice, has done more to diminish minds than build them.
	Gatto references the goals of mass schooling around 1910, 62 years after Mann’s vision. In his piece, “Against School”, he lists three goals. One of the three being: “To make each person his or her personal best” (144). This may be a step down from defeating all vices that invade the mind as Mann had wanted, but it is still a noble cause. If only it were possible to extract one’s personal best by implementing a system that slows learning down to a crawl.
Today, everyone in school will learn at the rate of the worst students in their class, unless they succumb to boredom and drop out. According to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, only 71% of students graduate high school (Colombo, Cullen, Lisle, 104). This is a shockingly low number, and if given alone, makes one think schools are too difficult. But, according to the same foundation, 86% of those who dropped out of high school did so because either their classes were not interesting, or they had too much free time and not enough rules (104). These dropouts are not stupid; They are not dropping out because they cannot understand the material. Rather, school does not provide them with a satisfying challenge. About one quarter, or 25% of all U.S. students will drop out of high school, never earning a diploma because the classes are too easy. Students in the current public education system are either be challenged by sub-par standards, or allow the monotony of it drive them near insanity.
	In Idiot Nation, Michael Moore writes about his experience at the average school. "I was bored beyond belief. The nuns, to their credit, recognized this, and one day Sister John Catherine took me aside and said that they had decided to skip me up to the second grade, effective immediately...” (126) Moore was smarter than the rest of his classmates and given the opportunity to advance. This would have allowed him to slightly circumvent the broken system but, because of how unusual intelligence at such an age is, he was instead put back into the first grade on his parents’ wishes. "For the next twelve years I sat in class, did my work, and remained constantly preoccupied, looking for ways to bust out.” (Moore 127). He was not provided a challenge in school, and slowly grew to hate the system because of the monotony.
	Some have suggested a two tract approach to education, or – a way to cheat the system and get children, who otherwise would not have gotten one, a high school diploma. This system allows students to study side-by-side separated into classes based on IQ scores. Mike Rose, an intelligent person, had the unfortunate opportunity of going through two years on the wrong side of one system just like this. In “’I Just Wanna be Average’”, Mike Rose discusses his time in the dreaded vocational tract. After being put with these substandard students, he “…developed further into a mediocre student and a somnambulant problem solver, and that affected the subjects [he] did have the wherewithal to handle” (154). This is the product of a slow, low-standard education. Students are not in the vocational tract learn, they are there to fill a quota and get moved along like sheep until they can be used to help improve the statistics that politicians turn around and use to say: “See! The children are learning.” But they aren’t.
	Rose further explains his friends’ mentality when faced with this slow curriculum. “Reject the confusion and frustration… Fuck this bullshit. Bullshit, of course, is everything you-and the others-fear is beyond you: books, essays, tests, academic scrambling, complexity, scientific reasoning, philosophical inquiry. The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own grey matter to make this defense work” (156). The lack of challenge is forcing these students into stupidity to protect themselves from going crazy. A wall has gone up that prevents the permeation of all knowledge.
The taxpayer is supporting the meaningless education of students when “…one-quarter of U.S. public schools reported that the condition of at least one of their buildings was inadequate” (Moore 130). This nation does not have the funds to pay our teachers or maintain our schools because it is trudging around carrying the weight of students that, as Rose puts it, have already adopted the “Fuck this bullshit” mentality (130). But, the burden on the taxpayer and the schools is not the fault of the students who have retreated into stupidity. It is the fault of a system that forces these students to do so by catering to the lazy.
	Moore makes a decent point that, “A nation that not only churns out illiterate students BUT GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMAIN IGNORANT AND STUPID is a nation that should not be running the world…” (123), it should be the quality of our graduates that counts, not the quantity. What good is a diploma, after all, if they are handed out equally to those who bash their heads against the walls of an elementary course curriculum trying to peer at real knowledge, and those who sit back with no aspirations further than doing as little work as possible. A nation full of graduates is worth nothing if all graduates have is basic literacy.
	And so the virus of apathy spreads away from the confines of the public education system, and out into higher education and the job market. Employers look upon the high school graduates that are tainted with apathy and proclaim in unison that they need more. So they look to the colleges and demand that their employees have a degree. Professor X speaks of this in, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”. “There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated and so should our medical-billing techs. And our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature” (245). This was not true in the past, and is solely the product of a mediocre public education. A high school diploma no longer carries meaning since the worst of students are capable of graduating.
	By allowing the feeble-minded to graduate high school without expending effort, we are allowing the spread of apathy. We must raise the difficulty of education and standards of education as a means to filter the students and starve out the disease. We must provide a challenging educational experience for students with true capability, and replace the dropouts from those quitting out of boredom, with those quitting out of the true lack of skill.
	In the past, those with true capability were allowed to emerge because they were not forced into the system that causes the spread of apathy, "…kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all" (Gatto 143). The people mentioned were taught, but not in a school. These great men and women were taught at a far more rigorous rate. We no longer have the future Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, or Benjamin Franklin learning now, and it’s a result of the lack of challenge in our schools.
	The current system cannot foster a brilliant mind; it can only destroy it. But, America has the power to fix this broken system by raising its standards. We do not need to clog our overflowing schools with the lifeless bodies of the dull who reject all knowledge. We can remove the lazy from the school enrolment lists, and restore dropouts to actually being students who cannot make the cut. We can again challenge and educate students creating the next generation of great thinkers. We must allow schools to be the inspiration and hope children seek, instead of the catalyst for apathy. To fix the system that has been created to empower us and implemented to destroy us – the system that is forcing intelligent children into proclaiming their stupidity to use as a shield against the tirade opposing intelligence – we must restore challenge to our schools until a high school diploma is, once again, an achievement to be proud of.


Works Cited
Colombo, Gary, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. "Learning Power: The Myth of Education and Empowerment." Introduction. Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Eds. Colombo, Cullen, and Lisle. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. 104-109. Print.
Gatto, John. “Against School.” Rereading America. 9th ed. Ed. Colombo, Gary, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. 141-149. Print.
Mann, Horace. “From report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1848.” Rereading America. 9th ed. Ed. Colombo, Gary, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. 110-119. Print.
Moore, Michael. “Idiot Nation.” Rereading America. 9th ed. Ed. Colombo, Gary, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. 121-139. Print.
Professor X. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” Rereading America. 8th ed. Ed. Colombo, Gary, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010. 238-249. Print.
Rose, Mike. “’I Just Wanna be Average’” Rereading America. 9th ed. Ed. Colombo, Gary, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. 17-21. Print.