Well I’m at Stanford University and doing well, so it must have done something right…
I find most people who criticize school don’t really offer any suggestions as to how it can be improved. What exactly is the problem and what exactly can be done to fix it?
Now, I have identified problems that I have encountered with the education system. I wrote a very long reply about it and I don’t exactly intend to repeat it, but some of the things that I mentioned were: less busywork, more hands-on problems and experiments, smaller classes, more individual attention to students, teachers that can actually teach (I had a teacher who really couldn’t and she should not have been there), exposing kids to subjects like economics and life-skills much earlier (and it should be required), more attention to logic and argumentative skills (I was exposed to that, but only in junior year and not too much of it), etc. those were some of the things I mentioned, but in more detail.
Now people will say things like “if you’re going to be a scientist, you should only have to take science classes.” I don’t know about you, but most teenagers aren’t exactly sure what they want to be when they grow up. I’m 18 and in college and still not sure. I think the fact that we expose kids to many different subjects is still the proper thing to do because what happens if you’ve been taking nothing but science and then you all of a sudden realize that you are fascinated by linguistics, a topic you maybe never knew much about before? Kids are naturally indecisive and prone to changing their minds and I think the different subjects is an adequate system. However, if a person is not doing well in a subject and knows they are not interested in it, I think they shouldn’t have to take it. My poor boyfriend was bad at math and really struggled, but he had to take it despite the fact that he really was not interested in it and knew that he was never going to pursue it past high school. And he’s incredibly artistic, but never really found an outlet for that at school. Definitely more creative classes. Creative writing was something that only “dumb kids” took at my school and it shouldn’t have been that way. Creative writing should’ve been encouraged!
Most people leave school and go on to college, correct? Shouldn’t school be preparing us for college, then? I think it has considering over 90% of my graduating class goes onto some kind of college the next year. However, not all kids are college material and those who don’t want to go to college should not be made to feel that they are making the wrong choice. Schools should be more supportive of choices like that (I know at my school, college was really stressed despite the fact that it wasn’t even a college prep school).