Eng101 Final Paper

Over the last hundred or so years our society has taken a dramatic shift, from that of the uneducated laborer to the learned worker. We have taken a system that was part of what helped keep the upper class always above the peasants, and made it accessible to the masses. The system that I am talking about is the education system. In the early part of the twentieth century the United States passed laws requiring compulsory public education that eventually would evolve into the system we have today where citizens between the ages five through eighteen must be provided some formal education. The noble goal was that by educating everyone we would achieve a better society where everyone had an equal chance at success. In Gatto's Against School he lists out what he thinks the stated goal of compulsory public education. "1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best" (2). Now nearly one hundred years later there seems to be something of a consensus that while the goal itself is noble the execution has been subpar for any number of reasons. I would argue that the true goal of education is to develop the skills of critical thinking and give a student the skills to solve problems for themselves. Unfortunately I feel that this is an area where the schooling systems are not only failing but perhaps actively training us in the opposite direction. Our systems of standardized testing that is easily quantified across a very large nation serves more to stifle creativity and original thought than it does to foster and develop it.

No two people are exactly alike, even to the way that they learn. There are some students who do very well in a lecture environment while there are those that will achieve much greater retention when they can read it from a text book. Neither method is wrong or better than the other, and usually there is some form of cross-over between the two for most subjects. What about those students for which neither of these methods work. There are those students whose ideal method of learning is not one of the ones that are easily scaled up. There are people that learn better with open forum where they can engage in idea sharing or in hands on experiences where you physically interact with the lesson being learned. Unfortunately both of these latter two are more time consuming and as a result more expensive. One goal of the current system is to educate as many people as they can with the given budget. This unfortunately leads to that those that either learn better with other methods or are already outpacing their peers tend to get frustrated and often give up on the system.

In addition to teaching as many people as they can it is required for many reasons including political that we are able to place every student somewhere on a graph showing how far along they are in this standardized model. Have they achieved enough knowledge to move onto the next area of study or do they need to repeat the course until they can recite the answers. Perhaps the purpose of standardizing the education everyone receives is to give everyone a fair chance at life, but there are times where instead of allowing a student to excel in an area of interest they are instead forced to wallow in mediocrity by being required to take any number of subjects of little or no interest to them. In his talk on TED Ken Robinson talks about a woman named Gillian Lynne who is a well-known dancer and choreographer. He says that in a talk with her she revealed that as a student she had been rather hopeless and was not a good student. He went on to say that had she been a child today she would have likely been diagnosed with ADHD. After going to see a specialist though it was revealed that she was "a dancer." When freed from the standard curriculum of education and instead given the opportunity to pursue something she truly cared about she went on to excel.

Sometimes it is not even that the student is not interested in the given subject, but instead it is an issue with the way that it is taught. When the foundation is built incorrectly it can cause a feedback loop of hopelessness where the student in constantly being reminded of a failure that they likely do not recognize as not their own. In the essay I Just Wanna Be Average by Mike Rose he talks about students in remedial classes struggling with what should be basic concepts. When presented with a new problem it just brings back "embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of longstanding inadequacies" (6). Eventually going on to blame themselves rather consider that perhaps it was the system itself that caused the problem.

Tests have become the primary method of gauging a student’s abilities and understanding of the subject. Standardization and its need to measure comprehension in numerical values demand it. This also requires that an attempt is made to give each student the same education so that when each score is compared versus another the results are as directly correlated as possible. These standardized educations depend on the teachers giving the students the required pieces to pass the test. As there is such a large volume of information to be dispersed and it leads to what Paolo Freire refers to as "banking" where the students become receptacles for information so that they can later regurgitate this information. This can have the side effect that many classes become a lecture hall where the students listen and take notes and then study these notes verbatim, regardless of how well the notes were taken. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem. The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of' capital' in the affirmation 'the capital of is Belem,' that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil" (1). Without some form of communication between the teachers and the students the teacher may have no idea where the breakdown between what was said and which bubble on the Scantron sheet was filled. These tests then show that the student did not correctly grasp the concept and therefore have not fulfilled their responsibility as a student. 

We have an entire nation to educate and not just any nation, the fourth largest country by area and the third largest by population. This leaves us with a very large group of people that we have obligated ourselves to educating. With so many people to educate and the limited means by which to do it the most rational method of making sure that everyone gets a sufficient schooling is to make everyone demonstrate that they are learning. This leads to the elevation of topics that are easier to delineate between correct and incorrect answers. Not only this but for those that could be more open to interpretation we are often given the compromise of answering in a fashion that hits on the points that the teacher covered in lecture so as to get full points for that short answer question. Rather than fostering discussion and critical thinking we are instead trained to give answers that are as close to what was given in class so as to receive the marks that will allow us to progress to the next level. This allows for a single teacher to grade five classes worth of papers of thirty-five students each, educating as many people as possible in as cost-effective a method as possible.

I think that the biggest thing that needs to change in our current education system is to reinvigorate the imagination. Require that the students consider the topics rather than just recite them. There is no rule that an intellectual can only rise from the education system and possibly some evidence to the contrary. One of the more eloquent writers out there, Malcolm X, actually got his education through independent study while in prison. He himself admits to never getting past the eighth grade (1). By contrast these standardized tests are training our students to all think the same way and our best hope lies in those students that can game the system. The ones that can well answer the questions the way required to pass but still continue to talk about and examine the topics after it is no longer "required." We need to limit the use of the hard fact driven tests and reintroduce the open discussion that counts for more than participation points. Innovation does not come from unchallenged ideas and identical thinking. We learn best from adversity and there is nothing more aversive than throwing your ideas into a circle to watch an incomplete idea get taken apart. It becomes a learning experience so that the next time the idea is better prepared and capable of standing on its own. Hard facts do not make for interesting discussions; it is the areas of gray that allow the imagination to thrive.

Works Cited

Freire, Paolo. “The Banking Concept of Education.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Books, 1993. Print.

Gatto, John Taylor. “Against School.” Against School – John Taylor Gatto. Cornell.edu, Sept. 2003. Web. 14 Mar. 2013.

Robinson, Ken. “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC. Feb. 2006. Jun. 2006. 14 Mar. 2013.

Rose, Mike. “I Just Wanna Be Average.” Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Print.

X, Malcolm. “Learning to Read.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1987. Print.