Our Education System is Broken

Cross posting from my personal blog after I realized I should have really posted this here.

Today marks the start of school in my town and I just watched as both kids left. As you can see from this picture they are growing up just as fast as ever.

First Day of School 2010

But, as I watched the school buses roll away, I began to think a lot about the year ahead for them and at a higher level the entire state of education in America.

If you haven’t noticed, it is completely broken. Sure, our kids are passing tests, going to college and doing ok for themselves. Not all of them and not nearly as many as I’d like to see, but you know what I mean.

I look at my kids and see how different they are and yet I know they are being taught the exact same way. Dylan is logical and direct. He excels at math and science and is on the fast track to some sort of engineering job if I were to guess. Emily on the flipside is overly creative. She excels at all subjects, but is a very free thinker and goes way outside of the box whenever she can. I don’t know what she will end up being, but it is going to be fun to watch.

But, our schools are teaching the same way they have for the past several decades. Same subjects, same approaches and all of it leading up towards passing standardized tests.

A couple of years ago we got called in to talk about Dylan being disruptive in class. When we talked to the teacher she told us that he was always getting his math work done before the rest of the class and then would try helping other kids finish theirs. That is disruptive? Come on now! We asked if he could bring a book in to read while he waited and she said sure. Why couldn’t she have thought of this? It isn’t exactly rocket science.

We need to challenge our kids. They are growing up in a world that moves at a super fast pace. Technology must play an active role in the classroom and teachers at all grade levels must understand and embrace it.

I don’t have all the answers, but I know that the way it is being done right now isn’t the right way. I’ve seen glimmers of hope out there and success stories happening and I pray those continue. We need to value and pay our teachers more. We need to insure that our kids are learning to think on their own and not just memorizing words and facts from ancient textbooks.

I know I’m not the only one worried about this. I also know that I’m going to see what I can do to help change it.

No related posts.

Tags: ,

C.C. Chapman is the Founder of Digital Dads and the Author of Content Rules. He is a family first entrepreneur with two great kids (a boy and a girl) who loves the outdoors, cooking, photography and playing with technology. He consults with companies around the globe to help them embrace the new world of marketing and business. C.C. is a sought after speaker, photographer and content creator who looks forward to each day as a new adventure.
  • http://flickr.com/tracylee Tracy Lee

    AMEN!!! I have been shouting this for yeas now as my oldest set are 27 and 25, I have seen the changes in the world and the lack of growth to follow in the educational realm. I do not know what the answer is, but I do know just as our medical system is complete broken, so is our educational system. By all rights, both should be totally revamped from the ground up, but that isn't going to happen any time soon. There is too much red tape and people with their heads stuck in the mud for real change to occur. Unfortunately, as the speed of technology and forward thinking rages on, our schools and our children are going to drop further and further behind, except for the fortunate ones to have parents like you and I.

    My hope is that we can set the stage so that when these children grow, they will recognise what change needs to happen and make it a priority to see it through to fruition. Sadly, I think that's the best we can hope for. Our work is to start breaking down the walls so that they may rebuild.

  • http://www.jeffpersch.com JPersch

    Whenever a discussion comes up about education I like to post a video from TED that you have probably seen already but is worthy of the discussion here. http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_scho…

    I think we don't demand enough from our children. Strike that. We don't inspire them enough in school. At home they are doing 5 things at once(homework, facebook, taking out the trash, listen to a brother or sister pester) and then we tell them to sit in a class room for 5 hours and not be antsy. I don't think the system is broken, I think it was never right in the first place.

  • http://www.getreporthelp.com Johnmharvey

    Hey CC – I couldn't agree more. I teach college and always try to incorporate 2-3 ways of teaching the same thing, so I can “catch” more students. Check out http://www.freerice.com its an interactive learning game, free on the internet. They should incorporate these types of learning devices in school. Seems like a no brainer…. do a subject for 1/2 and hour and have the students as questions when they hit something they can't figure out… duh!

  • Daniel L Holmes

    Bill Gates and the Gates foundation has been focusing a lot on whats broken and how to fix our education system … There is an interesting interview wih him on Http://www.techonomy.com and he has some interesting info on his web site http://www.gatesnotes.com

  • http://jamespburke.com JP Burke

    This is precisely why I chose to abandon software development and go back to graduate school to become a researcher in mathematics education. In my view, talk is just talk unless we can put some science behind some ideas. There is a community of education researchers out there, and they are well aware of the problems. They are under-funded and under-respected by parents, policy-makers and other stakeholders.

    Part of the problem is that science must be deliberate and time consuming. But parents and politicians want to know how to change things now.

    Often, when a policy is shown to be effective, it may be abandoned for ideological reasons as the local or state government changes; ideology knows best, regardless of the science. Many disciplines can transcend ideology; not so for education, which is at the whim of everyone because of its accessibility. Education research is the last to be funded and first to be cut.

    Science has brought us advances in many areas, but starve education research and you had better get used to an industrial age education system that was designed to produce our next generation of factory workers and shopkeepers.

    The promise of technology has also largely been a bust in education, again because people see it as a panacea: “technology must be in the classroom!” But what the heck does that even mean? Technology is already there in the form of language, pencils and books. Without appropriate research-supported curriculum, you get laptop initiatives that have no measurable impact.

    You can probably tell this is close to my heart and mind right now. In truth, the education system has not stood still for the last three decades. There is change, but it is slow. We didn't have high stakes testing twenty years ago. We didn't have the national report card, NAEP, which allows us to compare the progress of one state against another. But on the flipside, we didn't have as much teaching to the test.

    I don't have the answer, either. No one person does. What is needed here is science: a community of researchers bringing to bear the best frameworks for analysis on this complex problem. And we need support. What parent would accept a doctor's prescription of an untested drug? Yet parents rarely are heard calling for schools to base their activities on the latest research. This should be first and foremost.

    If this is an important endeavor, I suggest we do not leave the outcomes to anecdote, folk wisdom, and the whim of politics.

    One word of caution: don't conclude that a system is completely broken because of this incident with a teacher. I know you are more trying to express frustration here rather than present a compelling argument, but I am compelled to point out that since the education system is a human system, no solution is going to exclude human variation. That said, you certainly have identified a problem in this classroom. Is the teacher overworked? Too large a class size? Prep time becoming squeezed? It is clearly not and ideal situation, whatever the cause!

    It always encourages me to see dedicated parents like you who want to be part of the solution.

    Cheers.

Buffer
The shoe cables a repent reward near the visible.