Our Education System is Broken & Our Kids Are in Crisis

Our kids are in CRISIS.

I work with teenagers in an affluent suburban area. They don’t comprehend what they read. They use calculators to multiply 10 × 10. The average high school junior has no clue what the word “diligent” means. They write essays resembling those of 5th graders. About how Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity.

In standardized, global math testing, our 15 year-olds are behind TWENTY NINE other countries. Their performance in reading and science is not much better. And yet, American investment in education is unrivaled, globally.

Are you scared yet?

We also lead the world in the consumption of illegal recreational drugs. And one of the chief sales outlets? Our SCHOOLS. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world. There are over 5,400 suicide attempts EVERY DAY by kids in grades 7 – 12.

NOW are you scared?

Teenagers spend most of their time online, and in school. The internet is cracking our world wide open, and in its relatively nascent state, we haven’t found ways to effectively police what goes on in the cyber community. New ways to distract and distort teenage minds are invented online EVERY day.

Yes, I know. ((eyeroll))

You monitor your kid online. Sure. Because they haven’t figured out how to create a free Gmail account, download Instagram without your knowledge and create a free username with that account, then install apps that let you hide apps.

IF WE CAN’T KEEP PACE WITH TECHNOLOGY, WE NEED TO FOCUS ON THE SECOND PLACE WHERE TEENAGERS SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME… SCHOOL.

There’s a frightening disconnect between our tax dollars and the quality of our kids’ education.

Students are pushed through an uncaring system with no substantial improvement in classroom resources. We’re paying for pensions and health benefits that we just can’t afford. We’re funding exorbitant salaries for superintendents who lease luxury cars on our tax dollars while our kids’ brains are atrophying in the classroom.

And when the money DOES make its way to the students, where does it go? Let’s talk high school athletics…

People pro sports argue that school athletics provide exercise, supports team spirit and keep students engaged in the classroom. But are we obsessive about high school sports to the detriment of academics?

Statistics vary. Some show that we spend quadruple the amount on sports than we do on academics. I personally would argue that the money spent on high school sports is TEN TIMES that of the math department. The hidden costs of high school sports is a dirty little secret.

Football is the most expensive highschool sport. There are the obvious costs: maintaining a grass field for $20,000 a year, stipends for the teachers who coach, professional coaches who are hired at full salaries, the salary of the full-time athletic director, the new bleachers for a cool half million, the reconditioning of helmets… for more than $1,500 a team.

Now let’s suss out the insidious costs: travel costs – buses, hotels and meals – for teams, the band, and the cheerleaders for away games. The cost of the substitute teachers when the teacher-coaches travel for game days. For home games, there is the required hired security, the cost of workers to paint the lines on the field and to clean up afterward.

In my lily-white, soft, suburban area, these kids have about as much chance of playing for the NFL as I do of spontaneously regaining my virginity.

Why is all this money going to FOOTBALL?

And how many millions of dollars have gone to implement the Common Core? Or, the “Death of Learning,” as I affectionately refer to it.

Common Core shoves infuriating math down the throats of overwhelmed students, forcing them to learn the least efficient ways of solving basic problems. Common Core is indoctrination at its worst, a pedagogical succubus that has effectively obliterated all parental control of what is being taught.

The slogan of the Common Core? “College and career readiness.” Notice how the focus is entirely on the materialistic benefits of education?

Careers. Job training. Workforce skills. Turn our kids into bricks in the corporate wall. Entrench them in the vilest pornography of all – an existence based on conspicuous consumption. BUY MORE STUFF!

The Common Core = DEATH TO CURIOUSITY. CREATIVITY. DISCOVERY. DIVERGENT THINKING.

Does it really matter where the money is going, anyway? It’s being dumped into the current educational ideology which is OBSOLETE.

Our current school system is based on a model developed in 1850, at the height of the Industrial Age. It aimed to create robotic human beings whose behavior could be controlled. Prime them for a life of complacent factory work.

Take everyone who’s the same age, regardless of interest, or aptitude, and stuff them into an isolated room. Train them to move at the sound of a bell. Schools aren’t teaching ANYTHING except how to obey orders. They are irrelevant to the great endeavors of the world.

Teachers are not the problem. Well, some teachers are. Many care passionately, and work HARD. Perhaps, if we paid teachers a decent wage for doing what is essentially the MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD we could attract more talent to this profession. Get rid of tenure, and cut out the dead weight of indifferent and burnt out teachers who are in it for summers off and Cadillac benefits.

What are our kids really “learning?” To memorize scientific formulas when they want to write poetry? To interact with a frighteningly homogeneous group of people, cut off from the true diversity of the human experience? To lack compassion for those who cannot fit in? To be simultaneously arrogantly entitled and passively dependent while parental helicopter blades ‘whup whup whup‘ hover overhead?

The world isn’t just changing at warp speed… it’s growing at warp speed. The Internet facilitates the delivery of information in a way that is unparalleled in the history of the world. As a result, the human experience is global. Cultures are mixing. How are our kids prepared to maintain harmony in a diverse cultural world? Through the aforementioned internet?

And what about the 2 billion people who are predicted to inhabit the earth over the next twenty years? How will they be fed if we don’t create new food systems? Where will they live if we continue to pollute cities and destroy coastlines? How will they stay alive if we don’t combat the inevitable growth of new medical threats as our collective resistances grow?

We are “educating” our kids for a world that won’t even EXIST by the time they are adults.

How will anyone survive if all that is taught in school is"

• MEMORIZATION

• REGURGITATION

• COMPLIANCE

• CONFORMITY

For starters let’s:

• Forget about cramming testable data into a generation of multiple-choice test-taking ZOMBIES. We don’t need our kids to come out of school useless to others and to themselves.

• Stop destroying their PASSION by forcing academic sewage on them. Why must high school students learn geometry? It’s useless, unless you plan on becoming a professional QUILTER.

• Teach them something USEFUL: How to balance a checkbook. How to cook a meal. How to grow living things.

• Teach them COMPASSION: Involve them with the Real World. Make community service part of the entire school process. Start kids young, so their desire to give back to the world is INTERNALIZED, not something they do dispassionately to put on their fucking COLLEGE APPLICATIONS.

• Teach them INDEPENDENCE: Trust them with independent study. Let them choose their own reading curriculum. Kids learn to despise reading because the prosaic rubbish forced on them to read is painful. It’s the literary equivalent of jailhouse anal – without lube. Let them study outside the confines of the school.

• Cut out the vast quantity of homework, and give them back their TIME. Time to discover their uniqueness and what endeavors make their hearts soar. And let them pursue THOSE.

• INSPIRE THEM: I live 45 minutes away from one of the greatest cultural meccas in the world and some of my kids have NEVER GONE into New York City. Incorporate trips to museums. Let them be energized and invigorated by brilliant works of art. Take them on field trips to concerts. Let them hear a gorgeous symphony. Expose them to great theater.

• Allow them to experience DIVERSITY: Open their eyes to different ways of living.

Whatever garbage they’re attempting to teach our kids in the classrooms isn’t working. Students don’t like it, care about, or retain it one minute after they’ve been tested on it.

Our education system is a bloated, archaic, bureaucratic, imperial useless RELIC. It can’t be fixed. Let’s tear it down and start all over.

How?

I don’t have the answers. I’m not even sure I’m asking the right questions. But this is an EMERGENCY. Do you GET that?

I’m only one person, and I can only make a tiny difference. I can raise my son to be creative and freethinking. I can go to school board meetings and complain. I can engage people in conversation about this. I can write about this.

I can hit Publish.

Now it’s YOUR TURN.

Samara is the no-holds-barred, five times Freshly Pressed blogger at A Buick in the Land of Lexus. She mixes honesty with humor in high definition, first-person story telling. Samara is the founder of The Sister Wives blog, and has also had her work published on BLUNTmoms and Human Parts. She lives in New Jersey with her son Little Dude, the coolest 11-year-old kid on the planet.
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