Education in America

My wife and sister are studying to become teachers, my brother is a teacher, my mother-in-law is a teacher, and I have many close friends who are teachers.  I really believe that they are all excellent educators, but unfortunately I don’t think they are representative of teachers in general.  The current administration agrees, which is why they are pushing for education reform that aims to weed out bad teachers and reward good ones.  It is undoubtedly true that the education problems in America are at least partially caused by teachers with inadequate knowledge of the subjects they teach.  I have heard many stories of educators, particularly in elementary and middle schools, who cannot perform basic math or who consistently misspell simple words or who even teach completely false information because they are unaware of the truth themselves.  These stories always make my teacher friends cringe, and rightfully so.  If we really want better teachers, we must make their training more rigorous, focused more on the subjects they plan to teach and on student teaching, much less on educational theory.  Perhaps one or two education courses on the side would be helpful, but we should not be so easily qualifying those who are responsible for training up the next generation. 

Although improving the quality of our teachers is a prominent topic in the education discussion, it is only one step, and only a small portion of the problem.  While we could bring up all sorts of things – inadequate funding (which is huge), teaching to standardized tests, demographic issues – I would like to discuss two things that are often neglected in the discussion.  The first is the students themselves; the second is the overall implicit reasoning behind the American education system.

Having recently been through high school and college, and having a wife who teaches high schoolers every day, one thing is imminently clear: rich or poor, many students in America are not motivated to learn.  It seems that much of the arguing and disputing that goes on about how to fix education ignores this fact.  We cannot just assume that better teachers, more funding, or more appropriate curriculums will fix education – these will do nothing if the students do not want to learn.  To me it appears that the younger the child, the more his interest in learning is influenced by his teacher.  Great teachers can make a huge difference on young children.  But by the time a student reaches high school, it is much more difficult to reestablish respect for authority and a belief in the value of education if they have been lost throughout the previous years.  And it seems that more and more high schoolers have lost these values.

This lack of willingness to learn is at least partially due to the sense of entitlement that is growing among America’s youth.  The wealthy and middle class students often believe that everything will be provided for them, that every problem can be solved with the application of money, that their money gives them intrinsic superiority over others, and that they will always have money.    Ironically, I began writing this post, and then the next day I saw a post on Discovery News that discussed a recent study showing that narcissism and feelings of entitlement have been on the rise for the past fifteen years among US college students. I would wager that studies would find similar trends among younger groups as well.  Obviously, if students have tricked themselves into thinking they will advance in life without work, they have no reason to think education will help them.

Regardless of affluence, in all cases I believe that both the lack of immediacy of future needs and the collapse of the American family have combined to contribute to students’ lack of motivation.  For many kids, it is difficult to see the connection between doing an English worksheet today and achieving success tomorrow.  We live in a culture of instant gratification, and it is hard for them to see that education is a long task with equally long payoffs.  They want short tasks with current payoffs and little else.  Additionally, with more and more single parent homes or homes with absentee parents because of workaholism, many children are not receiving the guidance and discipline necessary to push them in the right direction.  They are never taught that money does not give them the right to be lazy or that the lack of education will often lead to ruin.  In fact, they may be implicitly taught the opposite of what they need, for many parents act as if money is all that matters or that they deserve certain things because of their place in society.  Sometimes teachers can work miracles on these kids, but we should never expect teachers to do so.  Lazy students and their sense of entitlement can only be cured by strong guidance and discipline at home.

Secondly, America does not seem to recognize what its real strengths are.  Whenever I hear a politician speaking about education, they always focus on our deficiencies in certain subjects, and they seem to hone in especially on math and science.  They say that these two subjects are important for the rekindling of innovation in America.  In focusing on innovation, they are headed in the right direction.  America has always valued free-thinking and creativity, and while math and science may be the realms in which we need our innovation to bloom, the creativity itself does not come from focusing on math and science.  What we should really be focusing on is achieving a greater breadth of education that exposes students to ideas from all realms of study.  It is in the intersection of various fields or in the application of ideas from one field into another where many of the greatest ideas dwell.  When it comes to innovation, focusing on anything too much is detrimental.  I know there is only so much money to go around, but if we really are going to produce innovative leaders, we should think twice about cutting the fine arts and other “superfluous” subjects that often focus more than other subjects on the development of creativity. 

I recently ran across a report that discussed the importance of a comprehensive education and how dedication to breadth in teaching seems to be one of very few traits that countries who consistently rank better than the US in education have in common.  Here is a list quoted from their website of some of the expectations in other countries:

·         Fourth graders in Hong Kong visit an artist’s studio, study Picasso’s Guernica, and analyze the works of modernist sculptor Henry Moore.

·         Finnish 5th and 6th graders study how the invention of writing changed human life and the impacts of the French Revolution; they trace a topic such as the evolution of trade from prehistory until the 19th century.

·         Seventh graders in Korea are expected to know not just about supply and demand, but about equilibrium price theories, property rights, and ways to improve market function.

·         Japanese 7th to 9th graders “conduct experiments regarding pressure to discover that pressure is related to the magnitude of a force and the area.”

·         Eighth graders from the Canadian province of Ontario are expected to create musical compositions, conduct, and know musical terms in Italian.

·         Dutch 12th graders must know enough about seven events connected to the Crimean War to be able to put them in chronological order.

·         Canadian 12th graders in British Columbia are expected to identify the author of the words: “Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men” and to what Admiral Nimitz was referring when he said: “Pearl Harbor has now been partially avenged.”

·         On a Swiss examination 12th graders write an essay analyzing JFK’s October 1962 proclamation that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Source: Common Core website

I am college educated, and I only ever dealt with Guernica, the musical tasks, and the economics, and the last two mostly in college.  But what tremendous thinkers we could develop if we taught students with the breadth of education that many other countries employ.  I am not an education expert, and I know there are tremendous hurdles to overcome, but I think we should begin to think more about a broadening of education rather than a narrowing of it.  Innovation in technical fields is not the result of producing workers who excel only in math and science.  Innovation will flourish when we produce more workers who are able to draw on education in many other fields to develop ideas.

The federal government may be able to reform education to help improve the quality of teachers and curriculum, but nothing will be very effective if families do not begin to invest more time in the encouragement and discipline of the young.  Especially in suburbia, children are often so pampered that their work ethic is eradicated by the time they reach high school.  Advocacy for a breadth of content in education must also start in the home, where children can be led into a wide variety of topics by parental encouragement.  In this age when America is accustomed both to being the best and to thrusting off responsibility for its actions upon others, we as a nation must admit we are stumbling and attack the root of the educational problem in the home.