Personally
(If I can avoid it) I don’t plan on putting any future children I may have in
the public system. There are a number of reasons for this, which can be summed
up in a very, simple statement: They’re failing. Then from that statement, we
branch out into the various reasons, as far as I can tell, that they are
failing.
1.
Public Schools in the United States today, miss
the very point of education. Public schools, by and large, spoon feed children
facts, formulas, and rhetoric, they tell they what to think, what to say, and
how to act, but don’t teach them how to think, and commonly discourage them
from using critical thinking skills to reason out for themselves what they
think, how they should act, and what is truth and not, and how that is and/or
should be determined. The point of education, historically never was, and
should never have become to smelt identical gears for the proverbial economic
and political machine. Rather the purpose of education, is to open up a child’s
eyes and mind to the world beyond what they have themselves seen and
experienced, to aid them in becoming thinking and productive global citizens,
capable of not just living and surviving in this world, but capable of changing
and shaping it for the better. Public schools in the United States actually
have come to discourage that in modern times.
2.
The United States education system is WAY too
assessment oriented. A child can fill in correct answers to questions on a
bubble test based on the isolated and disjointed facts a school has filled his
or her head with, and still not have a clue what any of it means or how it
applies to the real world. Likewise, a child wise beyond their years, who sees
and understands the connections and applications of what he or she has learned,
may, for various reasons, not be able to show that on a bubble test. Bubble
tests are only meant to measure parroting of memorized facts, not actual
understanding, and yet this is what the government uses to measure how schools
are doing.
3.
Public Schools are run by people who know
nothing about education. Curriculum and school policy is determined by teachers
unions, the leadership of which often make counter-productive anti-student
policies, community elected school boards whose membership rarely have any
knowledge or experience in education or psychology, and government entities who
also tend to not know what they’re doing in education. None of these groups
typically listen to input from actual educators and psychologists before making
or changing policy.
4.
Also on that note: the current state of teacher
tenure is such that even if he or she has outlived their usefulness to the
students and the school, even if a teacher is downright terrible and utterly
ineffective, if they have tenure it is next to impossible to fire them. While
those without tenure, even if they are the best teacher in the world, can and
will be the first to face the chopping block at the end of the year.
5.
Public schools teach and utilize an
over-abundance of political correctness. They white-wash everything they can so
as not to “offend” anyone. Contrary to popular rhetoric, they do not do this in
order to build a “more inclusive community” or “prevent discrimination” it’s
because they are deathly afraid of being sued by disgruntled parents and
community members. This is also why, unless it is an Advanced Placement class,
where the curriculum is determined, not by the school or the state but by the
College Board, history is only ever taught through one slanted lens or another.
The truth is that public schools discourage diversity because this fear of
being sued, causes them to disallow the students, much less the staff, to exist
on school property and be who they are. They send the subliminal message to
children that it’s wrong to be an individual, to have a distinct identity
beyond what society currently sees as desirable, and that the cultural,
religious, and family backgrounds that make them who they are, are things to be
ashamed of, things that should be hidden in the public space. All because they
are too scared of being accused of violating the first amendment by encouraging
REAL diversity, and being Truly inclusive, which I find both disturbing and incredibly
ironic because it’s the same rights that are guaranteed by the first amendment
that schools tend to strip away.
6.
Public schools neglect life skills that should
be started much earlier until it is almost too late. It has been scientifically
proven that it’s much easier for a child to learn a second or even third
language when they are little and learning it (or them) alongside their native
one. Likewise, it is much easier to teach keyboarding before a child has spent
their first 15 years typing by the hunting and pecking method. The idea that
these skills shouldn’t start being taught until middle or high school is just
insane. The same is true for learning HOW to study, when children are taught
metacognitive skills, (the ability to reflect upon what they did and how it
worked out, then change their method for the next time if needed) is something
that should be introduced before a child even reaches 1st grade. If
they are trained in this way the first several years of their educational
lives, they will be much better off in secondary school and college.
7.
Public schools are ineffective, partially
because many are simply too large and too crowded. Children get lost in the
machine, teachers don’t have time to get to know them, or factor the skills and
needs of their students into their delivery.
8.
Because public schools are subject to government
oversight and funding, they are also subject to government budget cuts. What do
they cut most often? Arts, Music, Foreign languages, and PE, they have proven
this over and over again.
9.
Public Schools use tracking, in other words, a
student whose test scores are high, whose grades are high, gets placed in a
higher track, probably with AP and honors programs. A student with lower grades
and lower test scores will be placed in a low track, which will not afford them
the courses needed to get into a four-year university upon graduation. A
student with low test scores, who excels in some classes, and struggles in
others, may not be allowed to challenge themselves in the subjects they are
good at, or if they can, will have to fight for the opportunity to take higher
level courses in that area. It is time we stopping punishing the children for
the system failing them, and held all our students to a high academic standard that
will have them prepared for college by the time they leave high school.
10. I
touched on this somewhat with points 1 and 5, but it really needs to be said
more directly. As much as some people in America would like to hide from this
fact, we are NOT a monolithic, monoculture, mono-religious nation, and to be
honest we never have been. To exist in functional harmony, to be able to live
in a world where I can be me, you can be you, and the kind lady down the block
can be herself, and yet we can still see each other as fellow human beings and
fellow Americans, we need to understand each other. We need to have some level
of understanding of who each other is, how each other sees the world, and why
we are who we are. That comes with learning about what the doctrines,
practices, and histories are of the various religions that have a significant
presence in US, but public schools, by and large are reluctant to teach this,
and I understand why, it’s because those brave schools who do quite often get a
lot of backlash for doing that, both from anti-theist atheists and from
religious fundamentalists, but honestly, stuffing the diversity that exists
into a back closet and pretending, as a societally normalized pretense that we
are all the same just doesn’t work. It doesn’t create a better, safer, more
understanding, more cohesive society. Until we open our minds to look at one
another and not see either an idiot or an enemy, we aren’t truly going to build
ourselves back to greatness.
11. When
schools fail to produce “adequate test scores” for a few years, a number of
incredibly stupid and counterproductive consequences follow, first of all, the
school district in question gets a bad reputation that makes it that much more
difficult to attract the really good, dedicated, qualified teachers that a
school in that situation desperately needs. Second, the state starts to take
control of the school and impose all kinds of new and arbitrary policies on it,
knowing little or nothing about the school itself, the community, or the background
and home lives the students are coming from; it’s basically a “let’s throw a
wrench at it and see what works” kind of situation. Often what happens, is that
art, music, and even more academic-based electives, along with everything else
that school once did to make school interesting or at least bearable, get cut
or squeezed out of most students’ course schedules in favor of beating the
basics to death in class after class, all this really does is wear kids down
and out.
12. In
many public school classrooms, teachers, who have themselves been taught to
employ such methods, micro-manage the students too much. It doesn’t matter how
a student solves a math problem as long as they answer it correctly and can
understand and explain how they arrived at that answer, nor should a student
for whom one section of the test was a breeze, be forced to wait to work on the
next section until everyone else in the class catches up.
13. Finally,
public schools these days are way to politicalized, history is taught according
to the lens of the current political flavor of the times, there are valid,
academic questions that students are being told they can’t ask, most likely
because either the answer is politically incorrect, or the simple act of
answering that question in a public, government-run school, is considered
politically incorrect. When it gets to the point that it’s directly affecting
education on an individual student-teacher level…that’s a problem.
I’m
not saying that public school can’t work, I’m not saying it’s a terrible idea,
but the system we have is broken and corrupt and the problems are systemic.
Throwing money at the problems that exist isn’t going to solve very much. We as
a nation need to take an honest, and hard look at our current educational
system… and rethink it down to its very core. Until we are willing to do that,
have come up with and implemented real solutions, and real education is
happening in these schools, I can’t help but see it as a train wreck, and not
something I would ever, ever trust my children to.
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