Why not allow children to study what they want to study, for their entire school careers? Obviously, there are many fundamental skills that must be taught, such as the ability to read and write, but these do not require many years or excessive exercise to understand, and can be perfected without the necessity to relegate reading and writing to a single subject. After these skills are learned, why continue regulating the students, limiting their fields of study, forcing them to look at broad subjects in detail, and then test them on it?
Today's educational systems seem to have a fascination with imposing harsher and harsher “standards,” increasing the amount of state-mandated materials that students must memorize, and decreasing the ability of the students to truly find pleasure in the quest for knowledge that schools claim to support. School may succeed in prepping children to pass their SOLs, or high school students to do well on the SAT, but the schools fail utterly in the end, stressing their students and managing to make courses that should be incredibly fascinating and eye-opening, such as chemistry or literature, into endless sessions of lecture and assessment, the teacher droning on, discussing specific problems or quotations that students will not remember by the end of the year.
The miracle of schools is that they manage to destroy this natural curiosity, overtly present in the kindergarten or below classes, with children literally begging to know why the sky is blue, or why birds can fly. Instead of working with this early intellectual curiosity, schools attempt to harness it, turning it away from the subjects that the students profess an interest in, and instead forcing them to read, year after year, the same quotations from George Washington, or send it slowly trawling through random historical fact, emphasizing points that the textbook recommends be emphasized, ignoring the dying hunger for knowledge that lurks behind every student watching the clock tick by, slowly, praying for the minute escape can be made, and enjoyment can once again be found in fanciful games in the playground.
Complaints of “apathy in the classroom” are commonplace, and as a response, initiatives are proposed to increase standards, to ensure that every student is forced to learn. It is amazing that the same people proposing these tighter standards and increased structure do not realize that they are merely contributing to the problem. If the first thing that pops into a student's mind when they think of the word “science” is a picture of a gray-scale classroom, with a teacher in front carefully watching the students, grading the homework from the night before and making sure that no one is looking up from their test, then obviously “science” is not something they will naturally be able to identify any sort of pleasure with. This is not a result of the rise of distractions, such as the internet or video games, but rather is a result of the release that cannot be found in school, and must instead be satisfied outside of the academic environment. This very quickly teaches children that the fun starts when they exit the classroom. The largest problem with their realization is that they are correct- school is not fun. Children, for the most part, do not enjoy it. Just like their corporate counterparts, students burn out. However, for most, exiting the system is not an option, and so they respond with what is the natural human response to inescapable and constant stress- they recede.
For many students, school becomes an obstacle course, a place where they must jump through the necessary hoops in order to get the rewards they think they want. They spend all their time focusing on getting past the hoops, and nearly no time examining what exists around and inside them. This is not what school should be. Of course, a basic understanding of subjects such as Biology, History, Chemistry or Literature is necessary. However, the word “basic” is extremely important here. Every citizen of the United States does not need to be able to calculate the number of moles of Carbon would be gained from the burning of CO2, but every citizen of the United States should, of course, have a firm grasp of what an atom is, and why it would act the way it does. After this conceptual understanding, specific understanding should not be required. It should, of course, be available, but only to those who wish to know it.
In short, the collapse of education in the United States is not a result of too few regulations, but too many. Education in America should be focused on holistic understanding, and the ability to use this broad base of knowledge to better approach the world. School should be fun, something that children can look forwards to. Students should be motivated to invest themselves emotionally in their schooling. The current system promotes none of this. Students are conditioned to hate the concept of learning, and motivated to separate themselves from their education, in order to deal with the stress it causes.
