# 9: The education system
Now let me be the first to say, teachers are essential to our nation and to our children. The profession of teaching is a noble one, on par with police, fire, military even the clergy. Teachers should be praised for their contribution to society and rewarded in kind.
That is the only for good ones.
I understand in every profession you have bad apples, you have lazy workers who do not care and are only there to collect a paycheck, I get that. But within that field there are some excellent, qualified teachers that fundamentally change their students. Those teachers should be given their weight in gold my friends. The problem is the system, the system rewards all teachers the good ones and the bad ones. No child left behind tactics don’t work either. The idea might sound good, make sure each and every student is reading and doing math at a basic level. The problem there lies in the fact a teacher can then elect to just train the students to pass the state required tests and teach nothing else. You lose a ton of creativity in the classroom which is the core of learning.
An example for you: In high school I had one teacher, honors algebra, who came in every day, read out of the book, asked us if we did our homework and when we said yes he took our word for it. This process was repeated every day and I learned absolutely nothing. I passed the class with a C, this is after learning nothing. The teacher’s response was “Everyone needs to pass so I can keep my spot.” There was one guy in my class who cut the class the entire second semester, he earned a D. The problem was partially with me, I didn’t care to learn, and there was a girl in class who liked to lift her shirt and flash people, that was much more important to me to watch than the teacher. However, it is the teachers job to inspire his students, to find a way to get them to want to learn, this teacher failed, and I would take it was getting more money in salary for “his spot”.
On the other side of the coin I took chemistry in my senior year, many people who had already taken it told me what a horrible class it was and I would hate it. I loved every minute of it. The teacher in this case showed us the world of chemistry in practical lessons. We made soap through chemistry, we made aspirin, and in a truly bold move and with permission slips sent out we made dandelion wine from scratch and distilled our own alcohol. At the end of the year we were presented with our own bottles of wine to take to our parents. I lived for each class; I soaked up knowledge because I was motivated to learn. Here you had a teacher who was teaching, and wasn’t in “a spot” because it was not an honors class. He kept our attention by presenting the material in a way that the text books didn’t spell out, but rather in a way that we could relate to.
To me this is teaching!
How about this as a new idea. When students get to the college level they select what they are most interested in. Usually this gets changed because the student is getting a new experience; they’ve never had to make these choices before and don’t really know what they want. How about revolutionizing the whole experience and from a very young age teaching students based on what interests them. Students from a young age usually excel in one or two areas like math, or science or reading. If a student excels in math, focus on math! Of course they still need to be trained in reading and science, but make the overall focus on what they excel at. Not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a rocket scientist. If a student shows promise in an area, expand that area and challenge them in what they can most readily understand. You could then revolutionize education by setting up math academies, science academies, etc. and enroll students in those schools that will gain the most from it. Fill those schools with teachers that excel in teaching the subjects. I never understood, even as a child a teacher teaching 8 different subjects, they couldn’t be that versed in everything, and as I got older and asked questions in certain subjects I often got “I’ll check into that” as an answer. The student now knew as much as the teacher. Why have a teacher who wants to teach math also have to teach English and science? That doesn’t make sense and can lead to teacher burn out. Let the teachers do their jobs that they are most able to do! Also start looking really hard at underperforming teachers and cut the fat, if they can’t effectively teach any subject what good are they to our children anyway?
Finally, and quite possibly most importantly, we need to get a control on out of control tuitions. There is no reason why it should cost $53,000 a year to send someone to Harvard, or $46,000 to Notre Dame, or $43,000 to Northwestern. Do the students really get a return for their money spent? Sure they get a great name on their diploma, and it opens doors into the working world, but does it really cost $40,000 per student per year to go to 30 credit hours of classes? I’ve been doing a lot of reading on this subject with journals, and periodicals from the likes of Forbes and Wall Street Journal and they agree. There is a lot of wasted spending by those Universities administrations. They know it, but they also know that if their program is that desirable people will pay the money. In a Forbes article it even stated that if the University raises tuition it often make them EVEN MORE DESIRABLE! We have been shammed into thinking going $100,000 to $200,000 in debt equals better. Harvard’s endowment has reached $35 billion in funds, so they spend that on the student’s right? A very little percentage of that yes, but overall the answer is no. They can take more students in with that much money, right? Sure they can, but they don’t enrollment has remained steady for the past 20 years, while the endowment has grown and grown and grown. Does Harvard really need $35 billion dollars sitting around? Hell in my city we are facing a $700 million dollar budget gap next year, how about a few of the local universities dip into those endowments and bailing us out?
A higher education should cost more than a basic one, I don’t dispute that, but it shouldn’t cost 4 to 5 times the amount of a private high school education per year, I could accept 2 to 3 times for a prestigious university, but no more than that. Unless we fix our educational system our country is doomed, the current trend of teaching texting instead of writing (Proposed in Indiana grade schools), grading papers with purple ink instead of red because red will make the child feel bad (California comes to mind here but I’m sure more states have done away with shameful red ink) and covering for useless teachers (unions are to blame for this one) is doing much more harm than good to our most precious commodities, our children. I’m very interested to hear back from teachers, I’ve said it before, I’ll say it now, I just have ideas, I’m open to newer and better ones. Until we can all get together and discuss solutions we are just spinning in the mud.
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