As a side-note, I love the teachers I had while in public education. A special shout-out to my sixth-grade teacher, Michelle Fluckiger, my French teacher, Sally Husted, my eleventh-grade English teacher, Kim Brydges, and my AP Government teacher, Steve Mendive. They stand out in particular as teachers who were helpful, encouraging, and actually liked their students. They weren't teaching just because it was a job. They were teaching because they felt they had something to teach.
But the public education system failed me completely. My senior year of high school was definitely my most successful year because most of my classes were correspondence, rather than a part of the system. When I went in and proposed doing my senior year as I did, my school counselor was quite unwilling to be helpful at first. This was not because she didn't like me; this was because the system is resistant to people who do not want to be coerced.
And in my case, I am quite unwilling to be coerced. I am stubborn to a fault.
Ever heard the expression, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink?"
In my case, you can't even lead this horse to the water.
And I know all kinds of other people who are highly intelligent, but did poorly in school. Again, the education system failed them.
It is a system where pace is set by the people at the bottom of the class, not at the top. This would be alright if we didn't have the same requirements across the board.
Health class has the potential to be useful to some people, but it wasn't to me. I did the entire class online in about three days. Clearly, not very useful.
And too many standardized tests. We've established that I am smart, alright? So stop making me take them again, and again, and again, and.... you get the point.
And my experience with public education was better than most. Here at Portland State, most freshmen cannot even write a remotely coherent essay. They have never heard of ethos, pathos, and logos. They cannot cite sources, and they don't know how to handle homework, or how to study for finals.
But the biggest thing that rubbed me the wrong way about the public education system was this insane emphasis on math and science. Massive cuts are being made to art programs across the nation, just so that math and science requirements can be met.
This is absurd. Not everybody needs calculus. Not everyone gets to be a banker or a scientist. We are going to need electricians, and artists, and musicians. We need writers. We REALLY need some real journalists. And so, for those of us (Anthropology) who are not interested in trigonometry, stop forcing it upon us. Math and science are good for those who like those subjects.
And, unfortunately, I am going to need some math, because I am also studying archaeology, which is a science. However, I have friends who are English majors. And Art majors. And they don't care about y=mx+b.
Science is important. Math is important. But they are not everything. Long before we were figuring out the area of a circle, we were painting on walls. And our society gives math and science too much importance. They are certainly subjects of knowledge, but there are other kinds of knowledge besides these two.
Our education system does not care about its students. Most of the teachers care, and most of the parents care, but public education, as a whole, does not care about the student. If it claims it does, do not buy it. Because I am one of the students it tried, and failed, to force through the system.
I say all of this because I was listening to someone talk about Asperger's Syndrome being a learning disability. I disagree with this concept of "learning disabilities" because education should be able to change to fit whatever the student's learning style is. It has no right to be classifying people as "learning disabled." If the education system was genuinely interested in educating students, it would do whatever it could to make sure everyone has the opportunity to learn the same things, regardless of how they learn.
But if public education is not invested in educating everyone, in what is it interested? Instead of suggesting that the students who fail have something "wrong" with them, why is the system not questioning what is wrong with itself? The system should be required to change to fit the student, rather than trying to change the student to fit the system. They have no right to try to change me, or anyone else, and what's more, they didn't manage to change me. I graduated, even if it was on my own terms.
I changed the system to fit me, and it was hard as hell, and finally, I succeeded.
No comments:
Post a Comment