How Our School System is Flawed

There are main reasons this topic has become an issue, one of them being we are not preparing our children for a modern future. As was mentioned in the video our schooling system hasn’t changed for hundreds of years. British author, speaker, and international advisor Ken Robertson has mentioned “Education is modelled in the interests of the industrial age and in the image of it”, meaning we still have the industrial age mentality. All students do at school is sit down and listen to instructions, But in today’s world we can’t get very far on instructions, our modern era values people who can be creative and communicative.

We are born with curiosity, we begin to wonder about the sky, the stars, what makes the world go round. But as we progress through junior high school all of this curiosity gets crushed, throughout school we learn through facts and memorization. Kids start to believe memorization is knowledge but it isn’t. The reason this continues to be an issue is because no one understands the meaning of exams, we are simply regurgitating information and forgetting it afterwards. This wont stop being an issue because our exam ways won’t change, they will continue to test students on their memorization and not their understanding. I feel there needs to be a change in policy relating to this issue because people are beginning to stray away from harder courses. Often when students have the option of choosing a course, they will choose something they see to be easy because that’s an easy pass. But when you enter the process of life what’s rewarded is tenacity and your urge to take on challenges. But in our system now it urges students towards the easier way just to satisfy the expectations.

Something else I’d like to say is, students now focus too much on grades and less on what they’re learning. I know this because as a student I am so fixated on grades and scholarships that I don’t care about what I am learning, I simply care about the results I’m getting. They say school is to prepare our students for the future, but as I said earlier literally nothing has change for hundreds of years, how are we preparing for the future if we are learning like the past. One teacher stands in front of 25 students with different strengths and different needs teaching them the same things the same way, but we don’t need 25 of the same students. Every single person on this earth deserves a chance of creativity.

Works Cited

1. Robinson, K. (2006). How schools kill creativity. TED Conferences LLC. https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity/transcript?language=en
2. Kim, Y., & Saxberg, B. (2017). Five principles for unlocking the potential of personalized learning. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/five-principles-for-unlocking-the-potential-of-personalized-learning
3. Darling-Hammond, L., & Rothman, R. (2011). Teacher and leader effectiveness in high-performing education systems. Alliance for Excellent Education. https://all4ed.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/TeacherEffectivenessReport.pdf
4. The Aspen Institute. (2010). The learning matrix: Connecting education policy to practice. The Aspen Institute.
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7. Sheehy, K. (2018). Creative collaboration: Schools create better outcomes by working together. American School Board Journal, 205(7), 24-27.
8. Zhao, Y. (2012). World class learners: Educating creative and entrepreneurial students. Corwin Press.
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