The problem with the education system
I was reading a post that that Chartreuse wrote and something clicked. He mentioned that the education system we all go through was designed for 20th century problems. It’s basically an assembly line where we get passed from one group of teachers to the next as they teach us the things we “need” to make it in the real world. Of course, Chartreuse also brings up interesting points about 20th century companies vs. 21st century companies and privacy vs. secrecy.
Anyways, reading that post got me thinking.
I agree with Chartreuse regarding the education system. It’s based on the idea that kids will go to college, interview with a few large companies, take the best offer (meaning the most money), and work there for the rest of the life. But that’s not how it works anymore, or at least not how it should work.
I know there are benefits to taking world history, calculus, English, physics, and the other general requirements, but what about learning about how to work in teams and solve real problems? Why not devote two hours a day to working in teams to solve big problems and then creating a presentation that shows how the group worked together to find a solution? Wouldn’t this be a real world experience? Wouldn’t this benefit kids more than a class that teaches basic typing for 50 minutes everyday?
People don’t know how to work together, they don’t know how to collaborate. Letting kids work in groups to finish homework assignments isn’t collaboration, it’s school approved cheating. Collaboration isn’t splitting up the problems to get an assignment done in half the time. It’s bouncing ideas off each other, realizing there is more than one way to solve a problem and combining everyone’s ideas to come up with one solution.
Obviously I’m not an expert on education, but something needs to be done to teach kids how to adapt to the way the world is changing. Schools can’t afford to upgrade to the latest technology every year and because of that kids are learning to do things that are useless. I recently learned how to write HTML using Microsoft FrontPage in a Computer Science 200 class. What? The teacher didn’t mention web standards, she didn’t mention that FrontPage’s HTML doesn’t validate. Maybe she didn’t know.
Rather than dumb things down so that students can learn quickly teachers and professors should be teaching students the right way to do things. It might take longer, it might take more than one quarter or one semester, but it will help them in the long run and it’s the right thing to do. Challenge students, make them work harder to learn. I’m sure some will fail…so what? Some are failing now and they’re not even being challenged.
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I agree. The school system is completely screwed up. It needs a massive overhall.
School these days is not about learning. School is about brainwashing kids to be ‘part of the wheel’ in the company, system, business, political party, whatever.
Teaching colaberation in school would be amazing. I tried to get kids in several of my classes to do this with “group projects” but none of the other kids would be their own individual. they all just wanted assignments and busy work. It was ridicious. I tried to get them to think for themselves and come up with an opinion and idea for the project and they just sat there and stared at me like I was speaking a foriegn language. Obviously I knew it wasn’t going to work and I just designed the whole thing, pieced it out, and told them how it was going to be and what they were going to do. They went to work and we all recieved the same grade.
Kids need to learn to think in schools.