Public Education: Part 2

Public Education has been on my mind since my post titled "Public Education Rambling," in August 08 and I really felt like revisiting it again today. I have since graduated high school and gone to college (Texas A&M University) to study Electrical Engineering.

I'd like to think that things change when you get to college, and in many ways they do. I live 100 miles from my parents, I buy my own groceries, eat whenever I feel like it, I have no curfew, I can skip class whenever I like and likely no one will find out. Most people find a middle ground in all this freedom, where they can do homework and study at their leisure while still having a social nightlife with their friends.

This system works great for me because, unlike my high school teachers, my professors hate wasting time just as much as I do. Don't get me wrong, they don't mind taking time out of their day to help a student or answer quesitons, but college takes a lot of the bureaucracy out of education.

In high school we had this "class" (and I use this term loosely) called Zone every Monday between our first and second period class. So every Monday I would leave my first period class early, report to the gymnasium where the volleyball coach had a sign-in sheet, tell her I was there on that day, and then sit on the ground for 30 minutes. I'm not exaggerating either, I would talk to friends on the phone, text, maybe talk to some of my fellow zone-prisoners, but no instruction of any kind every took place during this time. I'm sure that someone at some point thought that this "Zone" period would be a great idea, but after sitting through four years of it, I still haven't figured out what the hell it was for.

In high school I always felt like 3/4 or more of my day at school could be spent on something far more productive. I would often find myself trapped in some pointless class watching an instructional video on something I already knew how to do, not allowed to leave (for whatever reason). I really can't complain though, I've been given many opportunities to watch some great movies: I've watched Finding Nemo during Spanish II, A Beautiful Mind during a health class, Monty Python and the Holy Grail during a history course, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation during a physics class, and several of the Harry Potter movies (I don't remember what classes, but I assure you they were off topic). The public school system has become so inredibly inefficient, it's ridiculous.

Actual learning that took place within the confines of high school, for me at least, was few and far between. I thrived most off campus, reading and studying and learning what I wanted to learn.

I think the reason, or one of the reasons, for these epic wastes of time has something to do with the No Child Left Behind Act proposed by the Bush admin shortly after he took office in '01. Of course every President leaves behind a legacy, some good things they have done, and some not-so-good. This was, in my opinion, Bush's biggest mistake. Officially titled "An act to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind," it may sound fantastic to some, considering the already growing gap between some students, and the inability to test students nationwide on a standard scale. With such positively-charged words like accountability and flexibility, one wold assume this bill could do wonders for public education, but what ended up happening was the promotion of mediocrity, and the apparent lowering of standards to accommodate the average student.

In my high school, at the 11th grade level, students were given the choice to take either A.P. US History (preparing them for the college-level AP Test), or on-level US History. I made the mistake of taking on-level History that year, and found myself sleeping through class, carrying the weight of my entire class on some occasions, maybe memorizing a few new facts that I didn't know, but for the mostpart I didn't learn anything to speak of.

While my friends were in A.P. US History (APUSH) writing complicated, multi-page timed essays on the social impact that the 19th Amendment had on the American culture, I was being taught by my teacher (bless her heart) how to write a thesis statement. For most semi-intelligent people, one could probably learn to write a thesis statement in a matter of minutes. However, the level of laziness in my class caused my class as a whole to spend three weeks learning, essentially, how to properly form a sentence! I understand that I wasn't in a college-prep class, and maybe the learning process would take a little longer for some, but three weeks to learn a simple task such as this was absolutely ridiculous. It was at that point when I thought, "No child left behind? Why? Some people need to be left behind!" I could go on and on about the incredible stupidity I saw in my high school (supposedly one of the better schools in the city, nonetheless), but to archive all of it would surely drive me insane.

High school students have absolutely no accountability for anything related to their education these days. Admittedly I did take advantage of the system myself, and it was relatively easy. For four years I got away with doing little, if any, homework. Not once did I study for a test. Required readings for English classes were a complete joke (not to mention some of the most boring literature I've ever seen), we were taught the material in class that we should have read. If, for some reason, a student fails a test, a retest was almost certainly required by school policy, allowing the student to make up the test to a 70. Late homework was almost always accepted many, many days late (policies ranged from teacher to teacher), sometimes even weeks late.

I was able to maintain all A's and B's throughout four years of high school (except for one C in Chemistry second semester of my senior year, when senioritis really kicked in), simply coasting. I rarely tried, and when I did I wasn't motivated by the system, it was my own curiosity. I took a total of 30 classes in high school (equivalent to 90-120 credit hours in college), and I managed to find two (yes, two!) classes that were even remotely challenging and intellectually stimulating (Computer Science with Walter Lee, and Physics with Dan Ventura).

Earlier I mentioned that I thought things would change when I entered college...

Fortunately I probably have above-average intelligence and I'll turn out alright. But with a system so flawed, it's no surprise that my partner in my Engineering 111 Lab can't even write a lab report in complete sentences.

Here are the first three questions to our most recent lab:

- Which motor resistance value did you use (unloaded, loaded, disconnected)?

- Which motor did you connect the circuit to (higher or lower resistance)?

- What value of R did you calculate? Show your calculations.

And here are the answers I received in an email, to be pasted into the report:

- loaded

- our right moter

- 47.7 ohms

And this is supposed to be someone who, when he graduates, will be leading the world in innovation and ingenuity? I have my doubts, to say the least.

The truth of the matter is, some people need to be left behind! I'm sorry to be blunt, or politically incorrect as some would call it, but that's the sad truth. The United States wastes billions upon billions of dollars every year of taxpayers money to attempt to educate people who simply cannot, or have no desire to be educated. It is absolute madness. If the previously mentioned charged word accountability actually mattered in public education, we would undoubtedly see a change. The movement against Social Darwinism has gone too far, accomodating to people who don't deserve it.