All of my life, I have played the game of making a straight line of “A”s appear on a piece of paper. The rule of this game is simple: repeat after me. Despite its simplicity, this game is one played with trillions of dollars and millions of lives every single day, and the sad fact is that many people lose this game. With such high stakes it would be only fair for everyone to be judged in the same way, except we are not all the same, thus making the game rigged. The question now is how do we fix this game we call school?
It is hard to realize that (partly because we are not taught about it) there are alternate paths of education than the k-12 and college system we have currently. However, dismantling everything would be too chaotic and costly. Maybe in future days, when our country burns the wake of its ideological dogma and inhumane practices we will rebuild the system from scratch, but until then we need to work with what we have. Exactly how we determine if the system is working is actually one of the major problems with it.
Since our earliest days in school, we are graded by tests that focus on the regurgitation of information. Everything has to have a point value, everything has to be a letter grade and everything has to be correct on the first try. This does not facilitate learning and comprehension; it turns education into nothing more than a trivia game. The more points, the better your grade, the better your college, and the better your job, thus rendering the entire education system a pursuit of wealth.
This leads to all sorts of problems like students being able to justify cheating and other academic dishonesty. I saw this a lot during high school especially during the ACT and SAT testing times. Students getting hopped up on Adderall to get that extra edge on tests. The ends justified the means to the students because they felt validated in that extra couple points. Another disturbing thought is: what happens to all the students who fail only by a small margin due to test errors. Tests are rarely double checked by anyone, so the errors go unnoticed and the students wrongly branded failures. Every tests and assignment is used to reinforce that arbitrary evaluation of failure or success and consequently our feeling self-worth. We will not be bagged, tagged, shipped and sold by that splat of ink on paper.
The potential that resides within all of us is not something our education system tries to nurture. You spent the prime of your life playing a parrot, shaped you mind into a cog, and accumulated thousands of dollars of debt, and for what? To find a job in a market over saturated with college graduates all with the same skill sets and who will work for dimes to pay off the mortgage size loans? This education is no more an enlightenment than Wonder Bread is enriched wheat. In physics class we learn about action potential, but what we truly need to discover is our human potential.
Recently I discovered some talks by Sir Ken Robinson, an expert in alternative education, in which he addresses this very issue, “We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”
That is our task: to make every student realize that they are more than just a GPA and a bank account.
Grant Vargas
Senior Viewpoints Editor