Failures of the Educational System

The educational system has been failing for a long time, and the statistics paint a rosier picture than the truth.

It's no secret that there have been problems, and educators have been trying to find ways to solve them, the government has stepped in to find ways to solve them (or maybe they just wanted to use our kids to get elected), and the result is, our kids are all part of an experiment, and have been for many decades.

The bean counters and statistic keepers probably count me as one of their success stories, but my education was in spite of the system.

The first experiment the tried on me was offering me advanced classes in english and math by sending me up to the next higher grade for those subjects. They claimed that skipping a grade would stunt my social advancement, like that wouldn't alienate me from my own class.

The next experiment I recall was phonics. In my college years, I met a friend's mother who was a teacher, and the subject of phonics came up. I made the mistake of speaking my mind. I hate phonics. It was a bore and a waste of time. She clearly felt differently and made it clear to me that thousands of children struggled with reading before phonics came along. In her opinion it was one of the best weapons in a teacher's arsenol. That's when it struck me. So many of the things I hated in school weren't inherently bad, they were just bad for me.

Then there's the bell curve. Let's motivate our kids to compete with each other for the best grades, and guarantee that some of them fail. It even sounds like a great idea (not).

Testing. They still don't get it. Some kids test well, others don't. How do you determine someone's knowledge if they don't test well? And how do you compare them with those that do? The answer is obvious: You create standardized tests; You teach them how to pass the test. This has got to be the dumbest idea I have ever heard. Now we have a bunch of kids going to college that think learning is easy. Woah, that question wasn't in our class, what's it doing on the test?

Who comes up with this crap? Whole word reading. My grand daughter was taught whole word reading. To this day, she see's the first few letters in a word and guesses the whole word, not always succesfully.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was my responsibility to learn my subjects more than it was my teachers responsibility to cram it in my head. This, of course, lead me to learning the stuff I liked and ignoring the rest. My teachers recognized that they didn't know how to motivate me. They weren't properly prepared either, they are all products of the same educational system.

So what do we have?

We have a bell curve that leaves children behind, and a no child left behind policy that teaches them how to cheat the test and advance anyway.

We have a system that tries to teach all children as if they were the same, instead of teaching them according to their abilites.

We have a system that is more interested in bussing children around based on their skin color or economic status than on their talents.

We have a system that is starving for money and is cutting out some of the classes that might actually motivate some students.

Worst of all, we have a system where children think it's uncool to be smart, and failure only comes from the attempting, so don't even try and you won't fail.

I think the solution is to allow the students to learn at their own speeds, but that would never be politically acceptable. I am willing to bet there are hundreds of people that think they have solutions of their own, unfortunately, most of those constitute experiments on the next crop of children to find what works, and what doesn't. Most don't.