Education

Education reminds me of fast food. At least in the way we treat it. The people that create fast food are demonized for the unhealthy things the serve, and the obesity problem in America. There is a substantial voice saying they need to serve healthy food on the menu. But when they do that, nobody buys it. That gave us exactly what we asked for, but it wasn't what we REALLY wanted. We want the greasy cheap, unhealthy burgers because it tastes good. We don't want to eat healthy. We wish we wanted to eat healthy. It is a convenient excuse to say I have to eat out because I'm busy, and they don't serve healthy food. When there's no excuse left, we still eat junk. Because junk tastes good. We aren't willing to put our health above our instant desire for what tastes pretty darn good.

When it comes to schools, there is no shortage of problems. There are a lot of things that could be done better. but I think the biggest problem is as a society, we don't behave in a way that expresses education as important. We might say it. We might even believe it. But our consistent actions say otherwise. Sometimes we don't even understand that we aren't supporting education. Often times, we support good grades. That is nowhere near close to being the same thing as education. When kids get bad grades they might get in trouble. If a kid gets good grades and learns nothing, everything is okay. That is a problem.

We worry about behavior problems in school. We worry about whether or not students are showing up to class. We worry about test grades. We worry about the social influence of classmates. If there was an overwhelmingly singular focus on actually learning, a lot of that would go away. It wouldn't be so socially acceptable to treat school as a joke. If the vast majority of the teachers, faculty, students, parents, and everybody else actually expected you to LEARN, then showing up would be a given. You don't show up, you get behind, you just made things tougher for yourself.

When it's socially unacceptable to be dumb, people would put more effort into becoming educated. Culture influences an amazing amount of behavior. People will try to fit in to where they are most of the time. In other countries, education is so valued that even the crappiest jobs are filled with people with degrees. If you want a decent job, you need a degree. Everybody wants a decent job, so everybody gets a degree. All the decent jobs get filled, but you didn't get one, and you need to earn a living. Now you're a janitor with a bachelor's degree. It may seem like a waste of time to get a degree if you're a janitor, but if you ever want to be something better, then you can. In a society like that, what hope do you have if you don't have a degree?

I've watched documentaries that are talking up the benefits of charter schools, and when they show the incredibly successful ones, there is a dominant theme. Passion and commitment from everybody involved. While critics are quick to point out than on average charter schools don't perform better than regular public schools, I'm not talking about average. There's a positive feedback in the best charter schools. The teachers do incredible amounts of work to make sure that every single child is learning, doing whatever it takes. The faculty supports them. The parents expect their children to learn, and they speak the same positive message at home. Everybody around the child is saying you can and will learn. The biggest positive about a charter school is that parents made a choice to send the kids there. That means they already have put in extra effort into attempting to get a decent education from their child. It's possible the charter school isn't a good one, but chances are, the school the child was taken out of wasn't a good one, either, and they are doing what they can to do something better.

School is a joke. The only people that look at grades are colleges. All that matters is passing. No job you have is going to ask you what your GPA was. The problem with that line of thinking is that education is more important that just something needed for a job. It helps with life. Decisions are made from available information. The more information you have, the better decisions you can make. Education means acquiring information and being able to interpret it. When you learn you are practicing the process of taking information and making it useful and hopefully relevant. No job will ask you what your GPA is, but when your resume is filled with typos, is poorly formatted, is on green paper, and is 3 pages long, it's clear that you didn't learn how to write a resume, and also didn't learn to look up how to write a resume.

Your job might not ask you what you got in your classes, but when you can't do your job, it won't be long before you don't have it any more. One of the biggest complaints employers have about employees is lack of basic skills to do the job. Jobs are forced to do remedial training because their employees can't do the basics.

More important than job performance is understanding what is happening around you. Critical thinking allows you to intelligently evaluate information that you encounter. It's not being taught. It's talked about a lot, and everybody says it's important, but like the initial analogy, behavior shows otherwise. In the first 2 years of college students gain very little ability to think critically. I had a personal experience with a teacher where I was questioning the validity my teacher's statement. Asking for some sort of proof that what he said had any sort of resemblance to reality showed that he could only resort to fallacy after fallacy with an eventual threat to have me removed from class under the premise of disrespect.

It seems like Americans are starting to stand up for big changes lately. The little guys stopped cards from issuing needless fees on bank cards. We also stopped Sopa. Fights like these are continuous. Maybe it's possible that demanding education in our schools will be another thing we'll learn is worth having. Not grades, but learning. And not talk, but action, and commitment by the masses. Eh. Probably not. There are too many people with too much to gain in the short term by keeping us dumb and easily influenced *cough* fox *cough*.