Is Our Children Learning?
By Antonio Quezada
One of the most undoubtedly important aspects of our society is education. Without a functioning education system that provided students with the knowledge they need to advance, all other aspects of life would suffer greatly. So of course, we would want our children to have the best quality education possible. However, when one compares the education system of the United States with those of other nations, it is apparent that we are lagging behind other developed countries, and this really shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the action (or lack thereof) that the federal and state government has taken.
One often overlooked factor in schooling is the architectural design, which can be as important of an issue as any other. I have noticed that even if a school has ample learning resources, these can easily be wasted in an authoritarian and stifling environment, which discourages creativity and lateral thinking in favor of predictability and control. While school should have some measure of routine, coupling a monotonous teaching cycle with a restrictive facility always causes student (and thus, teacher) moral and initiative to falter. However, in some areas of the country, control must be tightly held by the staff in order to keep order. This problem is not necessarily one that reaches education alone, but can affect entire societies. To counter this problem, variety in environment is necessary, as it upsets the monotony of looming stonework and endless rows of lockers.
Another issue is the quality of the teaching we receive when compared what we pay for it. A study done last year by the Program for International Student Assessment found that the US wasn’t even in the top twenty countries in any field of study, even though the US spent more on education than every country on the list combined. Clearly, this is a problem that more funding will not fix. Rather, a series of reforms should be undertaken in many different sectors of society, because this problem does not have a root cause. The problem is from a combination of ills that not only plague education, but other sectors of life (crime, poverty, housing, Ect.), and just killing one root will not bring down the tree.
But in my observations, the biggest obstacle in the variety, depth, and coverage of student learning is actually the system of which the education is oriented, namely, the standardized testing system. Students and faculty must continue to study or review the same subjects yearly, in order to prepare the students for their tests, which lessens the range of student learning, since only the same subjects are repeated upon. While testing should exist, it should not be an exercise in repetition. Students should be encouraged to widen the scope of their education, but these kinds of tests hamper that by forcing instructors to teach identical curriculum, or spend most of a semester reviewing last year’s items that would otherwise be irreverent. It seems that these tests are on their way out of the system, so we should expect to see some improvements over the next few years.
Though other issues certainly need addressing, education is paramount in importance for the general well-being and prosperity of the country, and the next president will have to work together with the schools in order to get things right.
