Problems With Education

Problems with engagement
Problems with material and variety of subjects
Problems with memorization and tests
Problems with the system and grading and teachers/subs/lack thereof
Problems with numerical grades and fundamental grades

This is probably just my ranting, but I feel like the only way to get this going anywhere is to write down my thoughts as they come. The whole school system as I've seen it is just messed up, and I feel like I and probably countless others are suffering from it too.

First off, one problem with the school system is engagement in a class or subject. I myself am slowly drifting off because it's not challenging me, and so I just lose interest because it loses it's meaning.

This is partly because of the material and variety of subjects, or rather the lack thereof. This is also a major problem with the system and also colleges, which makes fixing it all the more difficult. I'm looking at the list for what you need to graduate from my current high school, ThunderRidge. I see Language Arts, Social Studies, Mathematics, Science, Practical Arts, Fine Arts, Physical Education, and Electives. But my question is: why have a set requirement for each student, when A) their career they want to go into might not ever use it, and B) It just makes it all the more distracting. You may think that there's no way to determine that, but at my high school, we have counselors to go to if we need help changing classes and such. Why not make them actually guide each kid to help them go into the career they want to go into. You may say, we'd need more people to do that, and you're right. We recently had an election about a certain ammendment 66, which tried to help teachers make a living working in education. If you didn't keep it all in the hands of these private companies, and paid people a decent salary, then maybe you could allow people to afford working here to do so. And you could also help with the community - hire people doing certain jobs to help counsel kids who have similar interests. You may say it's not practical since there are so many jobs and not many people working in those jobs - enough so that the chance of one being close by can help. But there's a fix. There's this term called the 21st century, where we have internet, and smart devices. That's one of the main fixes to a lot of stuff. If we poured money into collecting data and knowledge in a friendly manner and made it accessible to everyone, we might not need as much counseling, which goes back to my first problem. If we had all this information for jobs, we could have a lot more to cater to individuals' needs. Which is the main reason the system is messed up beyond belief. We have all the students set to perform to a certain level as everyone else in the world. Instead of raising individuals to the best they can be, we're trying to automate everything so that we don't have to spend money on it and can waste it fighting wars and other nonsense. According to the CIA World Factbook for 2013 estimates, there are 106,590,048 people under 25 years of age, which accounts to about 1/3 of the population. You're raising the next generation of individuals who are going to clean up this mess the older generation left us with 17 TRILLION dollars of debt. Along with a globe being heavily affected by global warming, and other countless problems.

Another problem is just that - what career are individuals interested in? Most kids don't even start caring until Junior or Senior year when they're going HOLY CRAP, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH MY LIFE, DO I WANT TO GO TO COLLEGE, WHAT CAREER DO I WANT, WHAT ARE MY INTERESTS, OHGOD SCHOOLWORK THAT I DON'T CARE ABOUT, the list goes on. Fortunately, we have a teacher called Mr. Erickson who teaches a class to help figure this all out, and even a club, called Future Business Leaders of America. It's a wake-up slap, like HEY, ARE YOU IN THERE? ONLY GOT 4 YEARS TO DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT TO DO, which is another problem. Why is it that we only have to start worrying about careers only in high school, why not change the school system to help kids figure it out as early as their first year of middle school, or even 6th grade in elementary to help them decide what field they like, and then as they progress through middle school and high school narrow it down. Hell, if you do that, high school effectively becomes college, you'd be able to take a variety of courses, and prepare yourself for a job, and if you want more practice/help go to college to narrow it down even further. I don't get why we're not doing this in the first place. We teach them all this stuff when most of it goes to waste.

Another of my list of problems is measuring how much people have learned, it has nothing to do with a certain subject. First issue is - why is it all about memorizing a certain thing that you're never going to use again. Which brings up one of my older arguments - why should we have them take a whole class with mostly stuff they don't care about - basically padding - when if they eventually need to use it, they can USE THE INTERNET TO FIND IT OUT. It's not that difficult. Another issue is - why take tests over said stuff that nobody really learned because it didn't apply to them? You wasted a whole unit and they didn't learn a thing. Change the way it works, and have each student create their own test to show what they've taken away from a subject - for example, if I was in physics, have me address a topic and use stuff I learned to help apply it to situations or explain it in our own way. Have the kid define the test instead of the test define the kid. This makes it even more powerful because if they're only in classes they're interested in, they're engaged and thus learn more and can apply it much better. Already, education is getting better. One example, I don't know much about it, but I've heard about it - senior project is a perfect example. People take a subject they're interested in, and apply it in some way. This also allows for a much deeper understanding of it all, but also requires more teachers, but if we could pay teachers and other talented people enough to take money off the table, then we could actually start making education that much better.

Also, perhaps the whole concept of grades is silly in the first place once we get rid of the nonsense standardizing for classes. We should instead help guide kids to the correct path and amount of knowledge. Even the fundamental grades system is silly. Nobody should be above anybody else, nobody should be MORE IMPORTANT than anybody else. We all have an equal impact on the world once we start working in a job. One seemingly insignificant example I thought of was sales, in a store. They affect the economy just as much, because if they're not doing it right, they're pushing customers away and making one store and company more important than another because they take their business elsewhere.

Essentially, we should actually help kids figure out what they're going to do earlier, and help guide them along the way (by narrowing down the subjects), and fix any potential problems (using readily available information on the internet to enrich understanding) ~Nick Poelma