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BS ‘n’ About…
Education in America
Educating our kids needs to be a, if not the #1 priority for any enlightened, forward-thinking society here at the dawn of the Information Age. As keeper and disseminator of the knowledge, education will play an increasingly important role as our future grows more complex.
Yet politicians treat it as the red-headed stepchild of fiscal policy. Every President campaigns as “The Education President”. But in boom times it still gets the scraps. In lean times it is the first thing to get cut. Not enough clout. Not enough votes.
But its not just the politicians. From Prop 13 to the latest round of ballot box stinginess, We the Voters seem to begrudge education every dollar it gets. We seem to forget where we spent our childhoods and not care where we send our kids every morning.
Sadly, we hold our schools in much the same contempt we hold our prisons. We build fences around them so we can keep an eye on them. We want them to do their job, but do it quietly and at minimal cost. We give lip service to preparing them for the Real World that awaits them when they get out, but we don’t want to get involved ourselves, nor do we want to know what goes on inside. And, since we’re out here and they’re in there, we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.
We need to start respecting education as the foundation of our society, not something ‘over there and out of the way’. It is the seed of our future. The environment we send our kids off to at six will be the world they’ll be building when they’re sixty. The roles and personas they play while in school are the same one they’ll be calling on throughout their life. Once a head cheerleader, always a head cheerleader.
We take five-year-old bundles of energy and wonder, lock them away in classrooms, and tell them to sit down and shut up for the next twelve years. We force feed them information, most of it irrelevant, then establish a rigid pecking order on how well they parrot it back. Our educational system is a frighteningly individual experience, evolving from baby teeth through puberty in the most intense social cauldron we’ll ever know.
It is a system built upon competition. But for every star quarterback there are a handful of guys who didn’t make the team. For every Rhodes Scholar, there is a prison full who dropped out in junior high. Any system built upon competition is a system that will teach many more losers than winners.
It is a system that fosters very little teamwork, empathy, or individuality. Nor does it adequately address communication skills, relationship building, and self-awareness. We learn those in that bubbling cauldron of pubescent chaos.
We need to start thinking outside the box. Put those first graders on a bus and ship their wonder and energy out to our workplaces. Give them a thirst for knowledge and a passion to design their own curriculum, then tell them the answers are in the library. They’ll learn to read. Take education out of the classroom and the result is a whole lot of Real World incentive. They’ll learn to succeed.
When the by-product of our education is teamwork, harmony, and self-awareness instead of competition, stress, and fear, can we help but be better off? Look around you. The Real World is driven by competition, stress, and fear. So is our educational system. Coincidence? I doubt it. Education is always the answer.
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