Enabling Education

America’s education system is failing and changes need to be made. Some elementary school students are interested in what they are learning about, but that intrinsic motivation starts to wane around middle school. Then in middle school they become jaded due to monotonous, unimportant, and irrelevant rules, classes, and assignments. There are solutions though, ones that should be thought about by the current young adults that plan to have children someday or plan on being a part of educational administration someday. Education is a vitally important part of growing up in a competitive world and in order to keep improving the minds of the future, certain steps need to be taken.

Some students are able to stay motivated throughout their entire educational career, but the rest are left behind because they are either apathetic for the reason that teachers do not peak their interests or they are too smart and teachers assume that they can handle themselves. Schools across the country should focus on setting goals in mind for the students like the Sudbury school model. The Sudbury school model is a form of democratic education where students decide what to do with their free time, every class (the word class is de-emphasized) involves interaction instead of passive learning, there are less age groupings, and “play” is emphasized in order to learn. All schools should try to make learning fun so that the critical thinking abilities they learn can be applied and appreciated their whole lives.

The idea of teaching students to think for themselves and to really respect their teachers and elders, instead of the fear-induced respect they are currently being taught each and everyday, has to come from educators. Teachers need to be caring leaders with emotional intelligence so respect for diversity and others can be taught through role modeling. Instead of spending time watching movies like “Remember the Titans”, activities should be done to learn to respect others. Teaching respect should not be kept waiting until high school before it is a disaster. Rules need to make sense to students. When I was in high school, all I wanted to do when I was bored at lunch was go down to the library and start my homework so I could have more time for fun when I went home. Some students just wanted to go down to the gym to play some pick up basketball games to blow off steam before they had to sit through some more boring and irrelevant lectures. Instead the Gestapo parental volunteers and other teachers that liked treating us like we were in Auschwitz held us captive. They only did that because they did not trust us, but how were they supposed to trust us when they did not respect us? They treated us like children in POW camps, so we acted like kids in POW camps.