Op-Ed: Rebooting America’s Education System · 9:57pm Nov 13th, 2020
This post has been a long time in coming. It’s one I’ve wanted to make for months, almost a year, really, but just kept putting off because of everything else that was going on. But at last, the time is here, and I’ve got a bit to talk about it.
I’m going to start out with a few obvious disclaimers: I don’t work in education. I came through the US education system, but I don’t work in it. I’ve taught, but on panels and in places like Sunday School classrooms, where attendance is pretty voluntary, and that’s a pretty different experience.
Second, I don’t wish for this post to be taken as “How dare you attack our teachers!” at all. Because it’s not. Most of the best teachers I’ve known have been hard-working individuals who cared a lot more about the job than the paltry paycheck they got in return would have indicated (much of which went right back to paying for things their school couldn’t).
This isn’t to say that there aren’t awful teachers out there, but they’re a symptom of the problems with the US’s education system and only a partial cause rather than the full cause.
I’m also not trying to say that the US’s education system has been flawed from the beginning. It wasn’t. Not initially. But … Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start where this whole thing for me started: With the biggest missed opportunity in decades.
The quarantine.
I agree with you.
That's the phrase that really hit me.
In college, I see plenty of people (on both sides of the teacher/student divide) complain that US schools don't prepare students to be there. Part of my tutoring job at the math lab was helping students with pre-algebra who were convinced they were too stupid for it (they were generally wrong about that), but there was a separate class of students there studying math "for the real world". I wasn't allowed to try to help those students unless I picked up an extra certification, because high school didn't teach me that stuff either. This other class had various units from across the spectrum, from basic probability to balancing a budget in a spreadsheet to figuring out how interest works.
And then there are the memes about concepts becoming far easier to understand when listening to an Indian guy explain it on YouTube. I feel like that's indicative of a failure in how traditional education in the US works.
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Agreed. It's not good. Worse, it's filtered into secondary education as well, as now we're generations into it. At BYU, for example, their math department is horrible, because they want rote memorization of things like calculus formulas and concepts rather than an actual understanding of how calculus works. I retook two semesters of calc at BYU after taking it in high school for college credit and it actually made things worse, because they couldn't explain anything.
I actually showed up at a pre-test study session and asked the aide, when given a formula 'Yeah, but how does the formula work?"
He spent the entire two hours of the study session trying to work it out, failing, and then berated me for wasting everyone's time, repeating that "All we had to do was memorize the formulas and we'd be fine."
That's not education.
I pointed this out on your main article, but it bears repeating. You missed a major reason why politicians won't make the needed changes to our education system, that reason being that it produces the kinds of adults that the political class WANTS. And that isn't a right vs left issue, both sides take advantage of these problems for their own gain. It is infinitely easier to pull off some kind of economic scam that only benefits politicians and their cronies, if the population is too uneducated to see through the scam. And it is a lot easier to keep people too divided to vote you out of power if they don't know how to do their own research on how your policies will really work, and form their own opinions of your platform. Till the parasites feeding off of the problem are voted out the reforms that our education system need will never be allowed to be brought up and made public. Never mind any attempt to correct the issue be made.
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I alluded to it with the lines about it 'getting in the way of what matters to the politicians-money' but left it at that, primarily for two reasons. The first was I didn't want comments dissolving into left vs right, as most party-aligned folks are want to do. The second was that with that, the moment you tell your audience "You may be one of the uneducated folks" they tend to be defensive. Better to let them arrive at that conclusion on their own.
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Yeah, the way I put it is pretty blunt. A better writer/public speaker could probably find a way to say it without making sound like they're calling the readers "uneducated", but the point would still stand. And the whole left vs right arguments you wanted to avoid, which ironically are a symptom of the problem, were the reason I assigned blame equally to BOTH political parties.
Been a while since I last hopped on this site. Good idea, but pretty much impossible to implement. Because greedy politicians are currently running the show in the states, their buddies refusing to enforce even the most basic of rules applying equally to all such as no insider trading, and their constituents being led around with big scary buzzwords like S O C I A L I S M .
The fact that the electoral race was so close despite the atrocious behaviour and lack of ethics these past four years from the government higher ups leave me no faith that such an overhaul would be feasible any time soon. They want aliteracy, and yes that is apparently a word, because poorly educated people lack critical thinking skills, and can be told to become outright hostile to the thought. Then you start slipping into 1984 territory with two-minute hate via "entertainment" "(not by literal legal definition) News" where they can make up anything they feel like and force an opinion as a "fact".
It has been an exhausting 2020. Sorry for the vent.
Edit: Spelling, additional venting.