Matt Hill
Writ 101
4/11/12
PAA
School
Sucks, Let's do Something Different
As a kid going to
school always felt like such a waste of time. Every time you learn
something the question would always come as “why do I need to know
this and how will it help me in everyday life?” It seemed like you
only would learn things so that you could do them again whenever a
test came. Why did we do tests? How many times does an employer sit
you down and ask you to write an essay on why Huckleberry Finn took
his raft down the river and what are the themes of the book? I see no
probable cause for why grown adults would do something like this. As
a child though school is one of those necessary evils and the real
question is why do need it and why is it the way it is?
I never went to a
public high school. I went first to an experiential, outdoor based
school and later a traveling high school. My graduating class was me
and three other kids. I never had 'the public school experience'. I
was never in the school the size of a small town. My class sizes were
never more than 15 people. Is this better?
I can't say that I
am an expert on how to school a child. I did go to public school in
middle and primary but these times do not seem as important.
Important how? Important as they did not teach me how to be an adult,
how to learn, and how to just been a general functioning member of
society. To me that is what high school is all about.
Why do I say this?
I say it because it seems true. As much as we want to see it not all
kids go to college. They don't all become doctors or lawyers or
business executives. For a large majority kids do go to college and
further their education but there are still many where education ends
after high school. There are technical or trade schools where we can
go and learn skills like how to be a mechanic but how many people go
there?
To me it seems as
if high school serves no purpose. You learn all of this generalized
information and then you go somewhere else to learn one thing. Does a
musician need to know who won the war of 1812? Does a poet need to
know integral calculus? No they learn how to write or master their
instrument. And what about the way schools just are? Kids sitting in
a room, all the same age. To me school seems more like an assembly
line, not so much as a place to foster growth of creativity and other
kinds, but a place to homogenize generations.
I want to get the
point across that I am not saying that primary and secondary
educations are rubbish or anything like that. It is wonderful to
teach children how to read and write, do maths, and learn a new
language. I would like to ask the question more so of should the
education system be held to a higher standard here in the United
States. Maybe higher standard is not what I want to say. I want to
say more of a different standard. In the United States to graduate
from high school you need to meet some requirements. Usually it
usually seems like Math, English and science be it either social such
as history or hard such as chemistry are the biggest groups we focus
on. Why? These are the subjects most used in the standardized test,
the ones that make you get into a good university and what not. All
kids need to learn these things and if they don't they can't go to a
post secondary institution. These topics are force fed into students
so that they then can spill them back out in hopes of doing well on
the tests. When I look around the sense that I get is that the
teachers are doing what is called 'teaching to the test'. Sure this
works make sure that all children end up knowing much of the same
stuff but does it really foster education?
Think back to the
time of the discovery of North America, or of gravity or anything for
that matter. All children learned that Christopher Columbus
'discovered' North America and that the prevailing theory of the time
was that the world was flat. In Galileo's time everyone thought that
the Earth was the center of everything until a man and his telescope
told different. What separates these great thinkers and explorers
from everyone else?
It was their
pursuit for knowledge their unabashed inquiry, through which they
furthered the global knowledge and technology. What I am on about is
the use and theory of inquiry based learning. Inquiry based learning
in a study done by Roxanne Owens inquiry-based learning is when
“student move beyond the Who, What, Where, When questions..
students engage in “What does this mean and how can I use this
information?” questions. They are pushed to expand their
understanding by creating new connections” (Where Do You Want to Go
Today?). It is letting student decide what they want to learn. It
gives them free choice. Giving children free choice to what they want
to learn? Blasphemy you say? True many would agree with you.
Children are fickle
they can not be left with bid decisions as to what is the best way to
educate themselves. That is the responsibility of the administrators.
What about guided inquiry-based learning? It is much the same however
it incorporates targeted intervention combined with inquiry learning
(Guided Inquiry). This sort of learning has come into play fields
like science and mathematics. In an article written about the use of
guided inquiry learning in organic chemistry labs Allen M.
Schoffstall and Barbara A. Gaddis vouch that “Inclusion of
guided-inquiry experiments in organic chemistry laboratory courses is
desirable to improve conceptual understanding” (Incorporating
Guided-Inquiry). Since most laboratory work is inquiry based it is
over obvious that it would be beneficial for the subject to be taught
in such a way to mimic real life.
All of this is all
well and good. These Ideas are all great 'modifications' to the
current educational system. Why would these be considered
modifications and not alternatives? In my thinking and experience
things seem to be shifting into either the above directions or the
opposite. More teachers spoon feeding children information. What if
there were a third direction?
When I went to New
River Academy there were two teachers (not in the whole school). Matt
and Andy. With Matt I learned geography and he was what I would call
a boring teacher. It was lectures and tests, homework and apathy.
Andy on the other hand was an exciting teacher. He was the math
teacher. My class was calculus, or what public school would call A.P
Calculus 1 or something like that. His class was exciting because it
was like a little adventure every day. There were specific things
that we had to learn, and they came and went but the parts that stuck
out were the projects and things we worked on.
Once a month we had
to do a project. It did not matter what it was as long as it used
math. For one of my projects I worked on waves, because we were at
the ocean and I wondered what effects certain things had on them.
Another time I decided to try and find the highest possible water
fall a person could survive going over and what it would look like in
terms of lip shape. I never completed the second one as I ran out of
time, but I remember how interested I became in the project that
eventually I started researching anatomy, hydrology, all these topics
far from what I had planned. My original plan was to have just how
high a water fall had to be to provide a drop to generate the force
to crush a skull. That was it. Like I said, things got out of hand
research wise and I was never able to finish the project.
When it came time
to see how I matched up against the other educated kids on the A.P
tests I felt rather impressed. In Andy's class our average, out of
three students, was a three. We all got a three, but to me that
proves I got an education. It did not seem proper, but it was good
enough to be average.
To this day I
regard Andy as one of the best teachers I ever had. I learned so much
from him and not just math. I like to think I learned life. I learned
how to be a person. This is that third direction I was talking about
above. It is the idea of unschooling. Unschooling is what it sounds
like. Not school. It goes against everything the traditional or what
is today traditional schooling system is. What is the current
education system maybe a slight bit unsettling.
Modern schooling is
based off the schooling system of late 19th century
Prussia (Germany) and is meant in both practice and theorey to not
educate so much as to dis-educate. It is a system designed to keep
the people “manageable” (Against School). To turn us into
consuming zombies. Do you see it? I do. Let me state it this way.
When you were a kid. Any time really does not matter. You come home
after school, what is the last thing you want to do? Usually it is
homework. Why do you need to keep learning? Modern schooling has the
purpose of driving away the desire to further our own knowledge. We
don't learn to think. We learn obey.
To unschool is to
learn to think. It is to learn to learn. A mind is a sponge, or a
sink or really any vessel that can hold things. When you are young it
is empty waiting to be filled. As you grow it fills and fills.
Eventually you reach a point where the sink or sponge is a little too
full and things start to leak out. When is it easier to fill
something? When there is room or when it is full. We use education to
fill this sink. Now answer me this why do we fill it with what other
people tell us to? It's my fucking sink, I will put into it what I
want. That's the kind of attitude you need.
What do/did Bill
Gates, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet have in common other than vast
sums of money? They never finished university. So often we are told
now more than ever that we have to go to school to get a good job.
Really? So the best way to get all the money in the world is to go to
college. Tell that to the the third richest man in the world. They
went out and they did what the wanted to do. They challenged
themselves and everything else. They pursued their goals and did what
they want and it turned out well. If they did not follow the
prescribed path the why are they the epitome of the modern definition
of happiness. Tons of money is all we need apparently.
Or so you think. Who
told you? Educators.It is always “if you don't do well in school,
you won't do well in life”. That is a load of shit. What is the
thing that unschooling teaches you more than anything? How to be a
person. How to interact.
Works Cited
Where Do You Want to Go Today?
Inquiry-Based Learning and Technology Integration
Roxanne Farwick Owens, Jennifer L.
Hester and William H. Teale
The Reading Teacher , Vol. 55,
No. 7, Owning Technology (Apr., 2002), pp. 616-625
- Kuhlthau, Carol Collier, Ann K. Caspari, and Leslie K. Maniotes. Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2007. Print.
- Incorporating Guided-Inquiry Learning into the Organic Chemistry Laboratory. Allen M. Schoffstall and Barbara A. Gaddis. Journal of Chemical Education 2007 84 (5), 848
- Gatto, John Taylor. "Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why." Harper's Magazine 1 Sept. 2003. Print.
- Llewellyn, Grace. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. Eugene, Or.: Lowry House, 1998. Print.
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