School Systems
Most other schools in the country are inherently flawed. The system of running kids through classes, treating them with bleach, and hoping they stay white. No matter how much they learn, or how much they’re poisoned by boredom, we do the same thing to each one.
One necessary basic change is the obsession with competition and “achievement.” Simply the existence of the “Honor Roll” program is evidence of this. The way it’s treated is even worse. Honor Roll is supposed to be motivation to students to try to achieve their best. But instead, it simply makes people that don’t achieve it feel like “failures.” The way it’s treated doesn’t help. In the 8th grade assembly this year, I heard the words, “each of you has the capability to achieve Honor Roll,” far too many times. Honor Roll should not be something you should get, and if you haven’t gotten, you’re subpar. It should be an accomplishment. But even as an accomplishment, it’s flawed. School is about each and everyone learning what they need to know, and ranking folks is useless. When you rank people, there’s always a lower level, and people don’t like to be there. When people win the awards, it’s not inspiring, either. I haven’t heard one person talk about how they’ll try harder next quarter because they achieved Honor Roll, but I have heard people give up and feel sad about not achieving it. Competition is visible everywhere, and I think it comes from two things: sports and capitalism. In a world where we all need to achieve the best, and make the most money, it makes sense that we’re training people in that way. And in sports where winners are revered and losers are put in Center Field, we can’t have a fair education. But a fair education will influence both of these things: sports will become more about the game, and the economy will become less corrupt.
Another simple change is to make school later. There is absolutely no good reason to have it so early, and people need sleep to learn in school. A number of factors, such as later dinners or nighttime events make it impossible to get to bed early enough. A later school time allows people to learn better, but also have a better and healthier life.
This change is slightly less simple, but it’s important. Homework is far too much of a stress on children’s lives. When I was in a circle talking about people’s fears for high school, “too much homework” was in more than 90% of the results. It’s something that really bothers kids, and I know it can be a pain. When we’re in school for a number of hours each day, and we should be able to live free for our child lives the rest of the day. Especially when extracurriculars and family-obligated commitments are taken into account, many kids don’t have the time they need and want to live a healthy life. And most of the homework I do, I know not to be too important. If it’s easy enough to rely on kids not needing help on it, it’s not necessary. So instead of having homework after school that so damages kid’s lives, some of the time in school, and maybe some extra if it’s needed, should be used for tasks which would normally be reserved for homework, such as writing an essay, where it is individual work. Homework is a hazard to mental health, and it could easily be revoked.
However, there are far less simple things we must change. The whole system we use is bad for everyone. We sort people by their age and teach them things until we’ve assumed they’ve learned them. Then we throw tons of tests at them to see how well they did. If they didn’t do well, they’re shamed for it. If they did do well, they’re congratulated. Then with their flawed understanding of the taught topics, they move on to the next class. Flawed even for the people who “did well” - a 90 or above is considered a solid grade, but that means the person didn’t understand one tenth of the material. And with all this focus on running through all the content in time, many topics are simply not taught - or worse, simplified. With this system, we have people who don’t understand moving forward with holes in their learning and people who do understand feeling bored. But the average person has a perfect experience, it’s just outliers that get this sort of thing, right? No, because of simplifications and time constraints, even people who weren’t bored but understood everything get cheated. I hear talk of this “huge change” that administrators are hoping to implement that will help all this. What exactly is that change? Apparently, changing the grade scale from out of 100 to out of 4. That’s real useful, it will change everything! Wait, no, that doesn’t change anything at all. It’s still the same system, just a different way of ranking people and squeezing learning out of them. What we need is a real change in how things are done, and that starts by removing grade and team lines. Classes should not end at the end of the year, or have to even stretch that far. Each person is taught the material they don’t understand, and once they completely understand it, they can move on to more material. It’s quite simple, but it makes all the difference. No one is held back, and everyone gets a full understanding of the material.
The way schools these days operate are flawed, and student’s experience of school, as well as overall feeling towards academia, would be vastly improved by an overhaul of the system that actually makes sense.