The U.S. Education System is Ineffective
Written by Carliann Espinosa, Former Student on Tuesday, December 1, 2015
How is it that students go to school for 12-14 years, 5 days a week, 6 hours a day for 180 days a year, and graduate not even knowing how to pay a bill or file a tax return? The curriculum taught to students is too broad. Even in public school, students should be learning more important information than formulas, like how to calculate the mass of the moon, which a small fraction of them will use after high school. School has turned into memorizing and passing classes rather than actually learning and retaining what the student has been taught. The drive to be educated on useful information needs to be reintroduced to schools in the United States.
Students walk around the halls every day, dreading their next classes, complaining on social media about how boring they are, and according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 8.1%, will just drop out. Students spend an insane amount of their childhood in school, all to account for what? The same piece of paper that everyone gets if they are able to complete all the same classes in the same amount of time as everyone else, when in reality, no person, or student, is the same. Everyone learns in different ways and everyone has different goals and aspirations in life. Why should students be learning and filling up storage capacity in their brain with useless information they will never use again?
Students have begun to realize these unnecessary education requirements and disagree with them every time they have a test on a subject in a class that they know they are not interested in. From an early age, students should have altered and specialized education offered to them only in areas they are interested and what is helpful and useful. In Washington, integration of technical schools and getting college credits while in high school can begun to increase. There are school such as Sno-Isle Tech Skills Center in Everett which caters to students in Snohomish and Island County. This school allows students to get an education in a field they are interested in, while completing their required high school credits. School like this are very useful to these students because they prepare them for real-world experiences and knowledge. If we do not start to implement more learning programs like this, the amount of students who are unhappy with their education and ill-prepared for the real world, is going to increase, and the generations to come are not going to have the knowledge to carry on successfully in the real world. Students need a useful education.
As author, Daniel Cottom, stated it in his novel, Why Education Is Useless, "…those who are book smart are lacking in street smarts." This has proven time and time again. The expectations and requirements to graduate high school or be accepted into a university are just average, and the quality is similar around the country. Depending on the college, or funding of high school, the requirements are as follows: four years of mathematics, four years of English, three years of Social Studies, two years of Physical Education or Health, two years of a Fine Art, and two years of Foreign Language. Yes, it is a good idea to have these basics, but in reality, students are going to use a fraction of what they learn in high school throughout the rest of their lives.
If there were not such strict class requirements, more classes offered, and and with a class credit amount a student has to reach, the system would make much more sense and the student is going to end up learning much more valuable knowledge in the classes they choose than if they continue to learn the same thing every other student is learning. Indeed, there are alternate schools where students can get an education which is more specific to what they want to learn about, but that comes with a price. These school have to be paid out of pocket by the family that is also paying taxes for the school they don’t want their child going to because they want their child to get a good education.
Students need to be educated on world issues because in this day and age, politics and terrorism are hot topics. If you asked fifty percent of the students at any given high school, they couldn’t tell you anything longer than the 140 characters they get to read on their twitter feed about this attack and how this candidate said this and that. If those same students were asked to fill out a tax return form, they would look at you with a blank stare. Students need a valuable education because the future of this country relies on it. We must keep students in school and learning about things that are going to benefit the student, and overall, the country as a whole.
