In Prince Ea’s great poem, “I just sued the education system !!!” He says, “… here is a classroom today and here is a classroom that we used 150 years ago. Now, isn’t that a shame? In literally over a century, nothing has changed. Yet Do you claim that you prepare students for the future? But with evidence like that I must ask: do you prepare students for the future or for the past? “
If you’ve walked into a public school classroom in the last … well, 100 years, then you know how to tell the situation. But let’s go a little further. 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 the best.
I’m going to leave teacher salaries and school funds and budgets out of this and just focus on our educational system itself, the structure of it. 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 a complete computer in our pocket, with access to all the information published on the world wide web, not to mention enough space for more than 5,000 images, and the ability to have an expensive conversation? face to face with someone on the other side of the world? And, STILL, our classrooms (especially those in low-income areas) still use blackboards, crammed with over thirty students in a classroom, sitting at desks that are falling apart, always without a pencil. Who needs a pencil today?
As a public school teacher, I can say that I have been very discouraged by the educational system and structure. It was so clearly created to keep minorities at bay and despite all the innovative ideas and the kinds of new and alternative schools that are opening up (in wealthy areas, of course), these schools just keep the pipeline cycle going. To the prison 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 a few 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 Look For:
Communication- We require students to raise their hands to speak, only speak when prompted, 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 professionally express their opinions, allow others to speak and find an appropriate time to respond, and respectfully disagree. This means that our students are basically never given a voice of their own.
Teamwork: Yes, students still occasionally work on group projects, maybe 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 were wondering, we still do old-school tests, end-of-chapter tests, state standardized tests, all of which students can’t max out on their classmates’ work. What we think of as “cheating” is what we then demand that they 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 benefited us (specifically young children in modern Germany to become obedient soldiers). Anyone can walk into a school today and see that everything is black and white, set in stone, strictly structured, and that the students are highly micromanaged. Assigned seats, bells (even minute bells!), Waiting in lines, etc. Students are not taught to manage their time, to make decisions about how to complete assignments, or even simply to choose in which environment they work best.
Thinking Skills: Teachers, and adults in general, are constantly jumping to solve problems for children from birth to eighteen and then all of a sudden they are adults and we just hope they know how to figure things out. Whether it’s conflict resolution and how to get along with classmates, 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 everything. these things for students! Or their parents call them and excuse them from solving their own problems (which shows 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. What matters is how they solve those problems, so we need to teach them thinking and problem-solving skills early on.
Resilience: Speaking of failing, what part of the CCSS curriculum does it cover how to recover from failing? Where in the CCSS curriculum does it cover how to overcome personal obstacles to being successful and creating a better future? If you are in your twenties and have had at least one job interview in your life, you have definitely had to give an example of when you made a mistake or failed at something and how you recovered. 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 entering the cafeteria, where we can basically collaborate and create a project with five strangers in five different countries, it is absolutely necessary. update and update our educational system. We need to think longer 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 the facts are 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 social skills that their future employers will demand of them.
