In Prince Ea’s great poem, “I just sued the education system!!!” he says: “…here is a classroom of today and here is a classroom that we used 150 years ago. Now, isn’t that a shame? Literally, in over a century, nothing has changed. Without However, you claim that you prepare students for the future? But with evidence like that, I have to ask: does it prepare students for the future or the past?”
If you’ve walked into a public school classroom in the last…well, 100 years, then you know how to tell what the situation is. But let’s go a little further than that. If you’ve entered a Title I school in the last ten years, then you could quickly understand why we have thousands upon thousands of teachers across the country on the streets demanding better.
I’m going to leave teacher pay and school funds and budgets out of this and just focus on our education system itself, its structure. School in America today is pathetic compared to the immense advances and improvements we have made in science and technology.
How is it possible that today, in 2018, we can have an entire computer in our pocket, with access to all the information ever published on the world wide web, not to mention enough space for more than 5,000 images and the ability to have a face-to-face conversation? face with someone from the other side of the world? AND YET, our classrooms (especially those in low income areas) still use white boards, packed with over thirty students in a classroom, sitting at falling apart desks, always without a pencil. Who needs a pencil these days?
As a public school teacher, I can say that I have been very discouraged by the educational system and structure. It was clearly created to keep minorities at bay, and despite all the innovative ideas and new, alternative types of schools opening (in wealthy areas, of course), these schools just keep the pipeline-to-prison cycle going. going round and round. As Prince Ea comments in his poem, we are not preparing our youth for a successful future.
For example, these are just some of the top skills employers are currently looking for (Careers NZ) along with explanations of how we are not helping our students develop those skills.
Top 5 skills employers are looking for:
Communication: We require that students raise their hands to speak, only speak when called, and only respond to specific questions posed by the teacher. Students rarely have the opportunity to have open conversations with their peers in which they have to express their opinions professionally, allow others to speak, and find an appropriate time to respectfully respond and disagree. This means that our students are basically never given a voice of their own.
Teamwork – Yes, students still occasionally work on group projects, perhaps creating a poster board or PowerPoint presentation. However, there is no room in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to discover your own personality type, learn to work with different personality types, learn to brainstorm together, collaborate, and build on the strengths of each team member. In case you’re wondering, we still do old-school quizzes, end-of-chapter tests, state standardized tests, all of which students can’t beat on their classmates’ work. What we consider “cheating” is what we then require them to have: the ability to work well with others!
Self Management: Whether or not you choose to believe the claims that the education system was created and implemented specifically to brainwash our young people into thinking and behaving in a way that benefits us (specifically young children in the German to become obedient soldiers), anyone can walk into a school today and see that everything is black and white, set in stone, tightly structured, and students highly micromanaged. Assigned seats, bells (even minute bells!), waiting lines, etc. Students are not taught how to manage their time, how to make decisions about how they complete tasks, or even how to choose the environment in which they work best.
Thinking Skills: Teachers, and adults in general, are constantly launching into problem solving for kids from birth to eighteen, and all of a sudden, they’re adults and we just hope they know how to figure things out. Whether it’s conflict resolution and how to get along with peers, how to find a solution to a math problem, how to complete two assignments on time, how to coordinate your schedule with classmates to finish a group project… we do all of these things for students! Or their parents call and excuse them from solving their own problems (proving that the school is not the only one to blame for this). It’s okay for our kids to have problems, it’s okay for our kids to be stressed, it’s okay for our kids to fail. It’s how they solve those problems that matters, so we need to teach them thinking and problem-solving skills early on.
Resilience- Speaking of failing, where does the CCSS curriculum cover how to recover from failure? Where in the CCSS curriculum do you cover how to overcome personal obstacles to success and create a better future? If you’re in your twenties and have had at least one job interview in your life, you’ve definitely had to set an example of when you made a mistake or failed at something and how you bounced back. But when do we teach that?
In a world where the iPhone is updated every six months (or less), where we can order our coffee from our phones before we walk into the coffee shop, where we can essentially collaborate and create a project with five strangers in five different countries, we absolutely It is necessary to improve and update our educational system. We have to think more long-term. Students do not need to memorize maps, practice alliteration, or recite Shakespeare unless it is directly related to their life and the skills that will help them have a better future. Let’s face it, almost all data is easily accessible on Google. Maps are even accessible on Google (including virtual tours of places like the Taj Mahal and the Amazon Rainforest)! What our students need to learn, practice and master are the interpersonal skills that their future employers will demand of them.