Our education system does a terrible job shaping children into professionals. Education is arguably the most important thing a society can do to
improve itself, and it is also something that this country, the United States, fails at miserably.
1
...the researchers ranked the United States No. 18 out of 24 nations in terms of the relative effectiveness of its educational system.
Now this study was done in 2003, but this laissez faire presidency, I think it's safe to say that not much has changed. The article cites our
processes of teaching to be the problem. It says we base our education around procedure and not content.
I happen to agree, but I think it goes further than that. Tests like the Myers-Briggs test often aren't offered to students until they reach high
school or beyond. The fact is, we fail at customizing education to real maximum potential - or even close to it.
What can a school do when it puts its mind to it?
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The Ospedale della Pietà is a convent, orphanage, and music school in Venice.
It opened in the early fifteenth century as a charitable institution intended to provide for orphaned and abandoned girls
These women were trained to be virtuosos in music. This was possible because they focused the education on it, and most people can accomplish next to
anything with the right training and determination.
These days, we barrage kids with a multitude of general education subjects that don't challenge anyone with an IQ above average. The system seems to
revolve around kids with average intelligence, and forgets about the children who don't need to hear a subject 50 times to understand it.
What does this result in? Kids get bored. Maybe the do drugs, perhaps they drop out, or maybe they just never accomplish what they could have. A
few hundred years ago, it wasn't odd for kids to be prodigies by the time they were 5 or 6 years old. Why?
People recognized traits in their children and fostered those traits to maximize their ability at success. We see kids who are amazing writers, yet
we waste their time until they are 20 before we let them really get into the technicalities of the subject. There are kids who are amazing at math
and sciences, but we bog their brains down with history dates and other miscellaneous information.
But even then, the kids are smart. They can handle the barrage with no problem, and eventually, they get so bored that it all becomes monotonous.
School becomes a chore instead of being exciting.
It is no longer about finding out what is the best path for him/her to follow, but rather stuffing their head with everything so that it can all be
sorted out later.
In my opinion, this is why the country is falling behind in all other aspects. It is partially responsible for poverty rates, crime rates, and all
other issues we face in society today.
The education needs to be revamped. Money needs to be disbursed more evenly between all schools, and the focus needs to be about a good education
that focuses on the strengths of each individual student.
People are all different, so why would it make sense that a generalized education would be beneficial to anyone?
