A lot of people wonder why many students don't perform well in schools. However, they...

contemplate the wrong reasons to solve the problem. They wonder: Do we need better standards? Or do we need better teachers? Maybe increasing the education budget will be a solution. And they have asked those questions, which resulted in the recent implementation of Common Core. Many politicians speak of schools needing bigger budgets, too. If these solutions did work, schools should have improved dramatically in the past decade, yet they didn't. Instead, we should recognize what's actually causing the problem and fix that. If we keep fixing the problem itself, it will always return. It doesn't matter how intriguing the teachers are if the student doesn't want to learn. It's their choice, and most are forced to make the choice to learn. One of the causes of the complication is exactly that — they are forced to learn, forced to comprehend it as everyone else is. But if they don't believe that what they are learning and the way they are learning it will help them in life, they might learn it — but will forget about it just as quickly. Many classes promote strict thinking: following a specific format or guideline exactly. It might help some that need a little more support, but it greatly restricts the freedom of all the other students. Thinking creatively will allow problems to be solved in life, whereas thinking strictly will only apply to specific situations. The math standards, for example, require us to know a couple of methods that a specific problem can be solved with. We can use the method, apply it, and get the answer, or we could think of a quicker way to solve the problem, and use that instead. Some problems can only be solved with the methods provided. But if there's a simpler way, they should be able to use that. If students could use their own methods to answer a question, it would require more intuitive thinking to get the answer. But instead, the standards motivates thinking analogous to computers, getting an input, choosing an algorithm, and applying it to return a value. Because we have to do this so much within schools, creativity is simply killed. It's also why having standards that all students have to conform to isn't a good concept. If the standards have a voice, it would be shouting, “All students need to know these certain topics, and if they know more, it's great, but we don't care.” It destroys the entire value of self-improvement and intellect. The goal of school is to learn to be smarter than everyone else so you can succeed in a competitive world. But instead, it's only making sure that we're smart enough. Schools are made to prepare children for life as an adult, through education. It gives them knowledge of situations, big and small, in life, but unless it prepares them not only with ways to resolve them, but also the experience to come up with their own resolutions, it wo­n't be very benificial in an vast and expanding world. Many know that what their taught in school might not even apply to them 20 years in the future, considering the progress of technology and other advancements. We shouldn't be taught what people half a century ago needed to succeed in life. We should be taught ways to find our own needs to succeed in life. Buckminster Fuller once said “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.” And yes, yes it's true. ferrisb

By Anonymous on General,