Education in the United States
Unknown | 2:53 PM |
Last night I watched the documentary film The War on Kids. I've long been a supporter of youth rights and I considered producing a documentary about the subject (I've even filmed some footage) but these guys beat me to it; and I'm glad. They did a fantastic job.
One thing that really hit home for me is the information about the poor quality of education because of misguided State regulations. The emphasis on learning to pass a specific test doesn't really teach anyone about the subject. For example, you supposedly study "American history" but you don't really learn American history; what you learn instead are snippets (many of which, such as Paul Revere's ride and the roots of Thanksgiving, sometimes include more myth than fact) that may be a few hundred years apart.
Many classes even have questionable value; when I was in the 9th grade I had a class called "Internet Explorer". This was a program about researching a country and writing about an imaginary vacation there, complete with the "make-a-poster-with-magazine-clippings" project. For some reason this was considered a high school level class rather than, you know, grade school.
I can completely relate to the frustrations of the kids interviewed in the documentary. Rather than purchase new books (In 1999, we were using half-torn textbooks from the 70s) my school district decided to cut down every tree on high school property and erect a giant fence around the buildings to, "Deter smokers".
Just about every other week our principal had drug dogs sniffing the lockers, and he searched the pockets of many of my friends after lunch break (which never produced anything-- if you smoked, you had the good sense to leave your stuff at someone's nearby house). And I can never forget the supposed "ADHD" kids hopped up on Ritalin that would go from being perky to apathetic (and occasionally suicidal). There were kids expelled for all kinds of silly things, like band T-shirts (Metallica and Snoop Dogg was against the dress code. So was short skirts, tank tops, and wallet chains).
I was looking forward to wood shop because it was a common project to build your own engraved hunting rifle stock and I thought that was pretty cool. Yet, our principal brought the hammer down and even though you can't shoot anyone with a wooden stock (no moving parts, ya know?), by the time I got to high school making anything beyond a small bookshelf was cause for expulsion.
I ended up dropping out of high school in the 9th grade, getting a GED and enlisting into the Army (a year before 9/11 went down). Oddly enough, it's only because I enlisted that I discovered I was smarter than I realized. In public school, I was a C and F student-- but I had very good GED scores. My ASVAB (the test you take to get into the military) was also high enough for Military Intelligence.
Five years later, when I went to college I took the COMPASS placement test and got a perfect score in Reading and Writing.
I promise you that during those five years I was in the Army, I did very little writing and the bulk of my reading entailed field manuals (Army literature is notorious for having typos on every single page).
I'm not sure if this says something about me (I do consider myself a self-taught writer) or it says something about how irrelevant the public education system is. My younger brother also had trouble in public school; he barely passed and had to attend summer school.
However, like me, he also did amazingly well on his ASVAB (unlike me, he did go into Military Intelligence. Where he was top of his class and has rapidly risen through ranks...I'll just leave it at that).
It makes me wonder if, perhaps, the public school educators are mistaken about the very subjects they teach and they find faults when there is none?
One thing that really hit home for me is the information about the poor quality of education because of misguided State regulations. The emphasis on learning to pass a specific test doesn't really teach anyone about the subject. For example, you supposedly study "American history" but you don't really learn American history; what you learn instead are snippets (many of which, such as Paul Revere's ride and the roots of Thanksgiving, sometimes include more myth than fact) that may be a few hundred years apart.
Many classes even have questionable value; when I was in the 9th grade I had a class called "Internet Explorer". This was a program about researching a country and writing about an imaginary vacation there, complete with the "make-a-poster-with-magazine-clippings" project. For some reason this was considered a high school level class rather than, you know, grade school.
I can completely relate to the frustrations of the kids interviewed in the documentary. Rather than purchase new books (In 1999, we were using half-torn textbooks from the 70s) my school district decided to cut down every tree on high school property and erect a giant fence around the buildings to, "Deter smokers".
Just about every other week our principal had drug dogs sniffing the lockers, and he searched the pockets of many of my friends after lunch break (which never produced anything-- if you smoked, you had the good sense to leave your stuff at someone's nearby house). And I can never forget the supposed "ADHD" kids hopped up on Ritalin that would go from being perky to apathetic (and occasionally suicidal). There were kids expelled for all kinds of silly things, like band T-shirts (Metallica and Snoop Dogg was against the dress code. So was short skirts, tank tops, and wallet chains).
I was looking forward to wood shop because it was a common project to build your own engraved hunting rifle stock and I thought that was pretty cool. Yet, our principal brought the hammer down and even though you can't shoot anyone with a wooden stock (no moving parts, ya know?), by the time I got to high school making anything beyond a small bookshelf was cause for expulsion.
I ended up dropping out of high school in the 9th grade, getting a GED and enlisting into the Army (a year before 9/11 went down). Oddly enough, it's only because I enlisted that I discovered I was smarter than I realized. In public school, I was a C and F student-- but I had very good GED scores. My ASVAB (the test you take to get into the military) was also high enough for Military Intelligence.
Five years later, when I went to college I took the COMPASS placement test and got a perfect score in Reading and Writing.
I promise you that during those five years I was in the Army, I did very little writing and the bulk of my reading entailed field manuals (Army literature is notorious for having typos on every single page).
I'm not sure if this says something about me (I do consider myself a self-taught writer) or it says something about how irrelevant the public education system is. My younger brother also had trouble in public school; he barely passed and had to attend summer school.
However, like me, he also did amazingly well on his ASVAB (unlike me, he did go into Military Intelligence. Where he was top of his class and has rapidly risen through ranks...I'll just leave it at that).
It makes me wonder if, perhaps, the public school educators are mistaken about the very subjects they teach and they find faults when there is none?
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