Dazibao 1 (Railing against the public school system)

Perhaps you’ve heard that the education system is broken, and if you haven’t I’m telling you now.  It’s run by the government and given for free to anyone who cares to attend, the downside being that it’s awful.  People are constantly complaining about how American High School students regularly score lower on standardized tests than Japanese students still in the womb, and what-not.

Now then, private schools generally do manage to produce higher test scores, but there is one small problem with them.  Specifically, they are also awful.  They produce results, certainly.  They produce them with ruthless efficiency.  But there’s a problem with this.  They’re not producing anything useful, just test scores.  Test scores, ultimately, do no good for anyone.  They earn diplomas for the people who get them, but think bigger.  What are those diplomas supposed to mean?  They’re supposed to be a symbol of education, they’re supposed to be proof that you know something, but a quick glance around the classroom when your teacher asks “How many of you remember X thing you learned last year” proves that High School teaches, approximately, jack squat.

The egg heads, the kids who are obsessed with school? They usually don't learn anything either. Most of the time, they know it all in advance. If you're interested in Math, you're going to learn a lot more Math on your own than you will with a bunch of other students who could all care less. Of course, advanced classes exist for these kinds of people, advanced classes specially geared towards helping them learn things they are interested in. This is a good thing. We need more of this.

Another thing we could use some more of is hands on learning. It's more effective and it's more engaging for the students. It also has immediate application in reality. It's one thing to learn about X in class, and another thing altogether to learn about X and then use X to do Y. Suddenly, you feel like you've learned something useful. If national security ever depends on your ability to do Y, then America can breathe easy. It's a nice feeling, no matter how slim the odds are that the ability to do Y ever becomes relevent.

Fun fact: Math and Science, probably the hardest and most tedious classes in High School, are also the ones that require the most remedial courses in College. Due to their monotony, they communicate nothing. If the internet is anything to go by, English classes aren’t doing too well either, if u no wut I mean.

If we’re going to make an education system that works, we need to stop pretending that test scores mean something.  We need to start focusing on producing real results because, though most people seem to treat school as something to fill up kids time so they don’t spend the morning kicking puppies, it’s actual purpose is to teach skills.

Mankind is a naturally creative, constructive being, and this creativity is actually more pronounced in youth, or at least it is whenever it isn’t being crushed by a cookie cutter “education” system that reduces both teachers and students value as human beings down to numbers stored in a server somewhere in Washington DC.  A real education system would nurture this creativity instead of destroying it, and use students interests to teach them naturally.

-Ashen