Week five of 11 Ap English introduced me to various media sources that analyzed the present-day American education system, and prompted me to search for my own. My teacher encouraged her students to synthesize our sources, most likely in the hopes of helping us on the essay my class wrote later in the week; the personal pursuit of evidence and conclusion was helpful, but only if done with genuine effort.
The different articles/sources/discoveries connect to the overarching question of: “Who does the American Education System truly serve?”; however, my personal (mini) research question was: “Is the American Education System efficiently adapting to the changing world around it?”.
In my class, a comic was introduced, which attacked the faults of required classes with lighthearted visual support; in a nutshell, the author portrayed the redundancy and uselessness of the required classes imposed upon students and highlighted that the knowledge gained from required classes are not useful in the long run.
A different source, with a similar message, came in the form of a youtube video called “Don’t Stay in School” (a video that went viral approximately two years ago); the creator criticized the school system for its failure to prepare students for the real world (ie. taxes, cooking, buying a house, money management), as well the useless information it forces students to learn.
Both authors would agree that the American education system is in need of a major change, and strongly disagree with its current required classes. This brought me to wonder if problems/arguments such as these occurred as a result of our system’s inflexibility.
However, as I analyze different sources, I’m starting to believe that the purpose of these required classes are not meant to teach students the periodic table or the workings of a rollercoaster; they are to teach teach students how to think/learn/see the world in a different way. This is accurately summarized by Laura Thomas ( Director of the Antioch Critical Skills Program) when she writes “I use the logic, reasoning, and critical thinking skills all the time. If those teachers hadn't pushed me to use those brain muscles (for lack of a better term) at a time when it was the LAST thing I wanted to do, then I wouldn't be prepared to understand and evaluate the information that comes my way every day.”
As a result to arguments such as this, I’ve come to believe that the classes within our required curriculum such as physics is not taught with the intention of mastering/ remembering its formulas; instead, the purpose of such classes is to train students to think and see in a different way. This doesn’t seem to be too far of a stretch; formulas such as the law of sines and cosines don’t always stick in a student’s brain, but they are much less likely to forget how to actually do them.
As a result to arguments such as this, I’ve come to believe that the classes within our required curriculum such as physics is not taught with the intention of mastering/ remembering its formulas; instead, the purpose of such classes is to train students to think and see in a different way. This doesn’t seem to be too far of a stretch; formulas such as the law of sines and cosines don’t always stick in a student’s brain, but they are much less likely to forget how to actually do them.
The American education system still has a lot of noticeable flaws that need to be tended to, however, the required classes in our curriculum may not be as horrible as the two authors made it out to be. At the same time, I am unsure if these classes art taught in the most effective way.
Another interesting week of 11 Ap English has been completed.
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