Last week, Karis gave her presentation on the school system in the United States. Oddly enough, early in the semester, I visited some of my professors at Cedarville and we had a similar discussion on the inefficiencies of the American school system. When a student graduates high school, there are very few jobs that they can go into and be prepared for; there are retail jobs, fast food, waiter, possibly mechanics, but the common thread is those jobs require very little training or no training at all. In essence, if a person wants to get any where in this country, you need some college training, a trade school, something of that sort. What I'm trying to say is that the school that we are REQUIRED to go to, does not prepare us for the real world. And if we're honest with ourselves, it's getting to the point where a college degree can barely get an entry level job anymore.
How could we change this? I have worked with middle schoolers, I know that the vast majority can handle more school than they are actually being given, they are smarter than the level of education we give them. Why not give them an education that actually challenges them? But not only do we need to challenge students in this country, we also need to make school relevant. In elementary school, no student really knows what they are going to be doing, but by the time they hit their second year of high school, most students have an idea of what they want to do.
This may be hard to follow, but I'm going to go backwards from a senior year to middle school and talk about how I think school could be done. As a senior, a student should be in classes that are relevant to what that student is going to be doing. If a student is into cars, their classes should be about mechanics or engineering; if a student is into writing, then their classes should be about journalism, or creative writing; an artistic student should have art classes; et cetera. A senior should also have classes about how their chosen field can be applied to real life. A Junior should have half core subjects (English, Math, History, Science) and half subjects that relate to what they want to do. A Sophomore should have half core subjects and half should relate to what they want to do, or be classes that are helping them decide what they want to do (like a Shop class, a writing class, an art class, social sciences, something that helps them decide). A freshman should have core subjects and guided classes that relate to career fields, perhaps some that only last one quarter or a semester. Middle schoolers should be exposed to career fields to give them a chance to make early decisions while they still have time to prepare or change their minds and prepare for something else. And regardless of what the class is, even those core subjects of English, Math, History and Science, efforts should be made to make the curriculum relate to the real world. Math classes should not deal with topics that can't be explained WHY it is important, history should not be a bunch of dates about dead white men, English should not be books that we don't understand and can't relate to, science shouldn't be a bunch of chemical formulas that we will forget because we can't use them.
The reason for all this is to say that we are sending students into the real world, and these students have no clue what they will be doing or how to use their education. High School should prepare a student for the real world. College should prepare a student for a specialized field and shouldn't be required in order to get a normal job, college should be there for students who want to go into highly skilled fields.
Perhaps this is all off base and if someone has another idea, I'd love to hear that too, but I think we can all agree that our schools are failing us and our children.
I think most of us would agree with that point. The schools could do better. However, has there ever been a time when the public education system was actually good?
ReplyDeleteI'm finishing up a research project that kind of deals with this topic. One part of the project addresses the rural consolidation of the Ohio school system. The first legislation to authorize a publicly funded school district in Ohio was passed in 1912. Up to that point, most schools were the one room variety. There are some serious limitations to this, you can only teach so many classes to so many students. As roads developed, it became cheaper to bus students to schools, and this is the first time that the modern consolidated schools were built.
As part of the legislation passed in 1912, a state wide survey was carried out to sort of asses the conditions of rural schools. What it found is pretty shocking:
Less than half of teachers had graduated high school.
60% of teachers had been teaching for less than five years.
Nearly half of teachers had no type of professional training.
Teachers in general didn't belong to any kind of organizations.
No school nurses, no sanitation, not enough space on the grounds... It goes on and on.
That was exactly one hundred years ago. It doesn't justify crappy schools, but the US doesn't exactly have a history of good schools.
Now when you think about it, its almost the opposite. Whereas there were no standards, and it was a one room school, now it is too structured and they have to use trailers for extra classrooms in some places.
I don't have an idea how to fix it, just remarking.
I guess when the needs of many have come to outweigh that of the few.
The really crappy thing about college is that 90% of jobs people get require a degree, but when you look at what the skill sets are, was that $80,000 education really required?
Oh well. As long we keep sending all the jobs overseas and exploiting people for shabby goods, I suppose we can still afford to live making minimum wage in a service jobs in McDonalds....
I'm a firm believer of a very well-rounded education that stretches far beyond what students are exposed to now a days. Students who are exposed to a wide variety of fields can exercise their minds further and can either find areas that would interest them that they may never had the opportunity to realize or be able to narrow their field of choice. At my high school, we had courses in the various areas of art ranging from photography and drawing to courses in the humanities, psychology, field biology and specialized history courses. These options allowed for students to be exposed to the areas sooner and challenge them to use their minds in different ways. Due to this, there were students who had a good idea what area of interest they would be going into and were excited to keep on learning. In the core classes, the progression of lessons, critical thinking and innovation in teaching was apparent as you moved from one year to the next. The end result was a good percentage of students being prepared or well prepared for the next stage of life and one step closer to the real world.
ReplyDeleteNow this of course was from the Beavercreek School district and other districts will have different results but it comes down to multiple factors and with my own personal teaching experience I can say the teachers can play a pivotal role in their preparation for college and the real world. The only issue is with all the red tape, standardize tests, time wasted on preparing for that and a variety of other issues, teachers do not have enough time to do all they need to do or all they want to do.
My graduating class was the first class to take the OGT test and I would always have frustrated teachers who wanted to teach us something new or useful but OGT preparation always came first.
In conclusion I don't think there is one real way to fix the current school situation since with all the different learning styles, backgrounds, subject interest and soon, we will be debating this for a long time.
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ReplyDeleteHa, the OGT, I forgot about that.I remember the 4th grade 'proficiency test' too.
ReplyDeleteYou know, now that I think about it, maybe the school system isn't as messed up as everyone seems to think. You can't teach the unwilling. I think think the actual student, and subsequently their family, is more the problem. Sure, you can spend all this money designing and implementing an education program but if the student doesn't try, its all for nill.
For example, we had a tech class in high school, had a robot arm and a bunch of computers and stuff. People cut all the power cords off the computers and broke the robot arm on purpose and all kinds of other ratchet things. They had to put a camera in the room, the only camera in the school.
What does this kind of thing say about family values and our society?
I know personally, the people that tried got something out of it. Other people, not so much. It's an issue that quickly spirals. The student doesn't try, the system gets blamed, then things like standardized testing is implemented. Well the student didn't care in the first place, and that's why they got bad grades, it seems like we keep trying to put a shoe on that doesn't fit or something.
Everyone wants to blame the 'system' like it is some omnipotent entity. There is no magic policy that is going to fix everything.
Consider this, I worked at the physical plant at Wilmington and WSU. I picked up so much freaking trash from lazy people. They just dump their car in the parking lot. Bust bottles on the sidewalk. These are college aged adults. People have this mentality stuck in their head that someone is always going to be their to pick up the slack or clean up after them. Damn lazy litter bugs probably don't try hard in school either.
The 'system' has a certain responsibility, it can grow outdated like I mentioned in the post above. I don't think that is the problem now.
If families and their kids came at it with the right attitude, and CARED then there really wouldn't be an issue. We could solve a lot of things if that happened, not just the school system.
Till then....
You're right, that this is as much a problem with society as it is with schools. But I would respond by saying we can be fatalists and allow society to crumble or try to do something about it.
DeleteWe are not going to reach those students who have no interest in learning, but there are many students who are interested when they have the context of why something is important to them. Would this change everyone? Highly unlikely, but would it improve the system? I think so. Will this be hard? Most definitely. What does it say when we don't make the hard decisions, when we allow a system to continue to deteriorate? There are many things that need to be fixed, but I would argue that we still need to try and fix what we can rather than just let the system collapse under itself.
Isaac Asimov wrote a story called "The Foundation" in which society had been moving along in a way for thousands of years that allowed problems to fester and get worse. By the time something was done, it was too late, but the goal of the story was to say that even if we can't fix problems with our society, we can put pieces in place to help those who come after us. Isn't that what history is about? Seeing problems in the past and trying to fix them for the present and future? That's been my view for a long time.