The education system is something I've always had an issue with (despite the fact that I wrote my twelfth grade term paper proposing a different system and earned my first--hopefully last--"C" on a paper). And I'm talking at all levels--grade school, high school, even at the collegiate level (in a sense).
School invades--if you're a college student--the first 23+ years of your life, all of which are supposed to culminate into some green light that says "You Are Now Ready For Real Life". First of all, this is misleading, because that nixes the first one-third of your life as not Real. You are only allowed to live in the Real World for the last two-thirds (if that) of your life, which constitute a family, a steady job, maybe some kids, a house, blah blah blah. It doesn't matter if in that first one-third you had a job, got pregnant, owned an apartment, got married, etc--the Real World doesn't kick in until you enter some new realm of existence. (Does it begin when you can provide for yourself? Or when you can provide for a family? If you suddenly become unemployed or divorced, are you ejected from the Real World?) School, in general, is nothing but preparation for this mythical, loosely defined state of being--or, put another way, school is preening us to become "productive members of society"--and that's ridiculous to me. It's so mechanized, so factory-like--God, I'm channeling Marx here--because we're basically just churning out kids simply to take the place of the current generation of workers. Ultimately, it's dehumanizing.
When you really look at some classes students are forced to take--especially in high school--this mechanization becomes all too clear. Take history, for example. Students study the past, memorize dates, names, events, people, etc., regurgitate them on a test, and then forget them to learn the new batch of useless information in the next chapter. Instead of learning and theorizing about the implications of the learned events and how they shaped (and continue to shape) our nation and the world, students are taught rote memorization. Is it useful to know that the Allied forces won World War II? Sure, I guess, but simply knowing it is meaningless. It is much more useful to know how that victory vaulted the United States to the top of the food chain to claim the title as the world's greatest superpower, and how that archaic post-WWII mindset still permeates through to today even though other countries are realizing that they can be just as strong as America (or, phrased differently, that America's power is waning to match their levels). It is more useful to look at the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq rather than to teach them as separate entities. It is more useful to teach how the Cold War still affects the United States' relations with Russia rather than just teaching Cold War facts. And yet we insist on teaching facts minus thought--memorize, regurgitate, forget, repeat.
That cycle isn't confined simply to history either--I'm an English major, and I couldn't tell you what a gerund is. I have a hard time identifying direct and indirect objects. Sometimes I forget the difference between who and whom. Math-wise, I forget how to solve geometric proofs. Don't ask me how to find the circumference of a circle. And do you know why all of these things simply left my brain? I found no reason to commit these empty facts to memory. They held no water for me, and I imagine it is much the same for other students.
In college, though, you get to study what you want to study (you have a couple of core requirements, but nothing like forced high school classes), and critical thinking--rather than rote memorization--is stressed. Basically, college begins undoing the cycle learned from the past 12+ years of school. And we can't pretend that college hasn't become a necessary part of a person's education: jobs have grown to be so specialized that it is virtually impossible to acquire a well-paying job without at least a Bachelor's Degree. And this wouldn't bother me if the cost of college wasn't fucking ridiculous. We create this need for well-educated employees and yet we can't offer them even basic affordable higher education unless they'd like to attend a community college (which are great and cheap, but not for everybody). (It never fails to baffle me how backward some things work.) And because college is so expensive, not everybody gets to benefit from the new critical point of view that is introduced in college curriculum, helping to further class divisions not only financially, but also intellectually (to clarify: all of this I say from a general perspective--I'm not saying a lower class individual is inherently less smart than an upper class individual, I'm just saying that the upper class person has a much better chance of furthering their education--and undoing the aforementioned cycle--than a lower class person simply because they have the money to do so).
Obviously, college isn't necessary to undo this cycle. But, in my opinion, it helps.
And if anyone ever reads this, they'll say, "Oh, she's just one of those liberals that complains and complains about a faulty situation but never proposes a solution." Sure, you'd be half right with that, I guess, because my solution is the light, fairy liberal drivel you'd expect: the education system needs to lighten up. Let kids study what they want to study before they get to college instead of forcing them into subjects in which they have no interest. Break the cycle of factual memorization that has become so prominent in the K-12 classroom and start integrating critical thinking before students go to college so they're well prepared for it. Pay teachers more than a pittance--they're the ones that are molding a child's mind when the parents aren't.
I mean, come on. Schools really are preparing kids to one day run this country in the future. So the most basic question is, would you rather have the country spearheaded by people who simply know things or by people who not only know things, but can interpret and analyze those things? For me, there's no contest.
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