HW 51

School has drawbacks and advantages just like everything else in life. What makes school so hard for many if not most people is the fact that school is a requirement for twelve years. Furthermore this requirement is so difficult because it comes at the age when people have the shortest attention span and the biggest ambitions. School’s most damaging affect is to ambition; school makes you focus only on what they are teaching which usually isn’t very interesting. Everybody has that one favorite teacher that taught that one cool class because for most people all the other classes are boring too tolerable with little past that.
The American educational system has basically zero relation with everybody’s life. All teachers say about that is “well you have to learn to tolerate things you don’t like that’s part of being an adult”. Well if being an adult means doing something you hate for eight hours a day five days a week then why would any reasonable person want to be an adult? The answer to that is people have been pretty successfully manipulated into feeling that they should just deal with something instead of actually doing something about it. It’s almost as if the people running our schools just resent their time in school and think that everybody else has to deal with it. One would think that given the politics of the 1960’s and the entire baby boomer generation that there would be a desire to reform our education system to apply the core knowledge and at the same time make things engaging for the students. However virtually nothing has changed.
The education system also doesn’t take into consider the differences that people experience geographically. I think that even though our system is equally bad for everyone that there should be some changes in curriculum to catch everyone up. Because as much as the education system gets legislated there’s no way to legislate how people raise their kids and where people grow up. For example anyone who lives in a suburban environment or just has a lot of experience outside of an urban atmosphere wouldn’t find an English regents test particularly difficult or out of the ordinary but for someone who doesn’t know about that culture their performance on that test would be highly impacted.
I guess my point is that in our culture there isn’t an equal playing field. It’s impossible to have one because of our culture or lack thereof. We come from immigrants (or forced immigration); given this multiculturalism we can’t have one single curriculum that dominates our education because with that single curriculum we force people out of their own culture and into a fake culture that really only appears on paper. Our sense of nationalism is only really channeled through violence and a Teddy Roosevelt desire for imperialism. What we don’t have is a face or a religion that represents this country. So in conclusion my simple point is that we need to respect every background for what it means and from there educate around their limitations to expand and integrate.