Anyways, away from the self-doubt and questioning, I hope this makes some level of sense to you and that you enjoy it immensely. Or a little bit. This topic is an important one, I feel, as education is an important thing and there seems to be something wrong with it given the usual reception it has from its students and the lack of preparation twelve freaking years gives a lot of new adults.
Education's Oversight by Mackinley Clevinger, January 29, 2016
Something is lost in any system as it develops to be better than its previous incarnations; a family business losing that personal touch when they become a franchise; the police force of a small town versus a large city; or a handcrafted vase at your local market versus a mass produced replica. Both versions of the system in question have their strong points, and their failings, in comparison to the other. Ideally, we would be able to live in a world that could meet these two sides in the middle to supply a public with the best of both worlds, as it were, and there is one area in particular that needs this method of treatment.
The education system has developed to allow for a much larger group to be taught at any given time, the thousands upon thousands of children mandated to enter a center of learning able to be processed and, by use of a rigid system, taught all the things they are thought to need to know. Education has followed the population rise in many areas, progressing from single classrooms, teaching a bare few, to large complexes with, ideally, state of the art technology that reaches the numerous hopefuls from far and wide to bring them the best learning experience available.
Thus was our modern style of education born, generated from the need to process untold thousands of faceless children to possess all the skills and knowledge they could ever possibly need until they were willing to pay out of pocket for more specialized learning. It, most certainly, has worked quite well for many; this system we put in place of ferrying children to and from these institutions to learn pre-selected material has succeeded in putting them all through the same process to reach the same state of mind and intelligence that regulations believe is necessary for them to function in society.
However, there has been an unwelcome change alongside the growth of education services; in its quest to teach a faceless mass, it has grown rigid and uncaring. There is a system to adhere to and enforce, leaving both the students and the teachers to work around its inconveniences. The priority has shifted to progressing a large class size through the selected material so as to meet pre-designated standards, instead of the basic priority of teaching the children the subject, and ensuring they’ve learned it. This problem is generated by two issues, the aforementioned rigidity of education that doesn’t allow for full comprehension to be reached before progressing them further onward, and that the information required to be taught to students is, for many, arbitrarily assigned and of no particular interest to them.
Education has stepped up to the task of teaching a multitude of students at a fixed rate by enacting a system that designates specified amounts of time to each section of study. Once that allotted time is up, the class is expected to move on to the next unit, and so on, until the course is complete. Along the way grades are assigned based on comprehension or, in some cases, short term memorization capabilities, and these are how the system knows how well a particular student has done in that class. But it doesn’t care. If a student is failing, signifying that they do not understand the material that has been considered vital to their knowledge, the class cannot stop to help them understand before they move on, it is required to carry on and leave them behind. Their grade is recorded and they’re left never knowing that key piece of knowledge, too great a workload already on the human components of the system to allow for remedial action to always occur. So long as they manage an average of understanding the entire class somewhat, they are allowed to pass and move on despite having no practical knowledge of these subjects.
But how important is the knowledge they’re missing? There an infinite number of ways to earn your career upon leaving any level of education; how many of them require the exact components the education system believes to be vital to every person’s life following school? Mathematics are a skill required in any walk of life, as they are necessary for functioning within our society, and of course the ability to read and write are a modern expectation, but when these classes progress to levels only of use to specific career choices, this leads to a disinterest in the students and a misapplication of their time spent learning. Not every child is going to be an advanced mathematician or be expected to dissect Romeo and Juliet, and yet many basic skills are completely ignored in education, that time taken up by classes that are, for many, useless, and required by the education system all the same.
Where are the classes that teach social skills, or basic home living capabilities? How many adults are incapable of simple tasks that would take perhaps half an hour to teach, which are vital to keeping up a standard of living? There are skills that apply to lives lived by everyone, and yet examining the works of a dead poet or mathematics that apply to one field of work are the old-holdouts that remain within the system still. These things are important, yes, but more important is ensuring that each student is able to be prepared for the life they want to live.
Education needs to bend around its students, not try to shape them all into the same form. Trying to take a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds and make them all walk down an identical path is something anyone would rebel against, and their disinterest of the topics they are forced to learn will lead to stagnation and a waste of time. Giving them greater choice for subjects that apply to the lives they want to live, while ensuring that required courses are for skills they actually need by changing modern standards, would make them more interested and willing to learn. Alongside changing the current system for education that cares about an averaged letter grade more than understanding what you’re learning, this could bring a balancing force to education.
To put it simply, education has come to care more for being able to check off a list of required learnings than for ensuring a student actually knows the subject in question, and this is for a valid reason. With a growing population, some measure needed to be taken to meet increasing demands that old styles of education weren’t capable of giving. However, in that shift to meet a larger population’s needs, the individual needs and interests of students have been ignored, instead all being funneled into the same classes despite varying career paths.
The education system needs to better promote students in developing themselves for their planned methods of life while also providing more useful skills than the mandatory classes currently employed. There is room for Shakespeare in our lives, but not every student has a passion therein. Some children adore calculus, while others don’t care for it. Expecting positive results from a largely differing student base all being required to learn the same thing isn’t going to pan out well, and has led to a student climate of a lack of comprehension and disinterest in whatever teaching methods are used. Some manner of change is needed to ensure better education for future generations, and that starts with giving them more freedom in following their own interests, not adhering to an uncaring system.