Last year, my mother retired from teaching after 35 years of dedicated service. At her retirement party, I was unable to count the number of former students in attendance. A number of them gave speeches praising her for her talent and her ability to inspire. Now lawyers, doctors, authors, dancers, and musicians, they all recognized her enthusiasm and dedication as the catalyst for their intellectual growth and success.
After years of pay downgrades, funding cuts, and maltreatment, teachers like my mother are more difficult to find nowadays. Once a strongly desired profession, teaching has become something of a fallback career, and as a result, fewer teachers are committed to fostering a desire for learning within students.
As a result, students are no longer being inspired in the classroom. School is boring, mechanical, and impersonal. Teachers are not encouraged to be creative with students, but to simply ensure their success on a variety of standardized tests. Students are being fed answers and administrators are falsely reporting results, all in order to produce higher scores and garner more government funding. I completely understand the theory behind standardization of education, but its implementation has been entirely ineffective.
Students are no longer learning how to think for themselves—they’re just being fed information to memorize. To make matters worse, more children are spending their time outside of the classroom doing activities of even lesser value. Kids are more likely to spend their free time outside of school playing video games or sitting on Facebook than going out and playing sports or learning an instrument. There is little pursuit of intellectual growth and thus children are much less likely to be stimulated outside of the classroom, making the school environment all the more critical for growth.
A good education used to be a priority, and at one point, a requirement. Regardless of what career someone wanted to pursue, there would be some form of learning necessary, whether it was a vocational degree or a university diploma. This was how we used to measure individual skill, ability, and qualification for a particular job or task. A college degree used to be part of the American dream. It was a crowning achievement, something for which so many used to strive.
Privatization is among several theories for how to reform education. On one hand, I see how privatization appears a viable option, but I’m not sure what it would look like if education was completely privatized. I fear private schools would begin to operate like corporations, making decisions based on profits rather than the well-being of students. Furthermore, I cannot imagine where the resources would come from or how educating kids would ever be cost effective.
A product of private school myself, I was grateful for the opportunity because I was exposed to so much that I otherwise would not have had the chance to see or do. Students attending public school, on the other hand, often fall behind and never catch up. Unfortunately, the extremely high cost of private education makes it difficult for many kids to attend.
When I spoke to various members of the Georgetown faculty and administration, they too were concerned with the current state of education, and harboring even bleaker outlooks for the future. The cost of college continues to soar at a rate substantially faster than wages and income, which can discourage or completely inhibit many from taking on the “burden of education”. Thus only the wealthy and those willing and able to undertake a lifetime of student loans populate our “elite” universities.
I believe that the system we had in place was effective for a long time, until budget cuts and standardized testing put more pressure on teachers while cutting their benefits. In my opinion, there is no magical way to fix education, but increased funding for public schools is necessary. In addition, the system would benefit from a new method for evaluating teachers and administrators to guarantee excellence. Simultaneously, school curricula need to be redeveloped and districts physically restructured to ensure that students are actually learning and thinking, rather than just memorizing for the purpose of higher test scores. Standardization can succeed when balanced with the recognition of the different emotional and rational capacities of individual people.
As a country, we need to recognize education as one of the most important factors in our success and growth. Cutbacks on education spending aren’t going to help us out of our economic situation. The future is dependent on the brainpower of children and young adults. If students are not asking questions, but simply accepting the answers being fed to them, then I believe the future of America is looking quite bleak.
