Our school system has devolved into young, impressionable students staring with dead eyes at a glowing screen. Students are forced by law to sit down for seven hours, and now, due to the one-roof policy, West Potomac students aren’t allowed to get a tiny bit of sunshine between periods while they walk to their next class. The only escape from their mind-numbing routine is electives, the classes that allow passionate teachers to finally do what they chose the profession of teacher for to teach, to leave an impact, to bring the joy of education to the growing members of society without being handcuffed by curriculums.
State education departments have such a loose grasp on reality that they have been teaching the same things for hundreds of years. In recent years, teachers had school board meetings in which they were all told ways they can prevent students from using AI and in the same breath were told about all of the AI tools they could use to help with grading and teaching. Why are we sheltering students from the world’s innovations? Why are we trying to keep students in a primitive world where the most important thing is learning about the Persian War again and again but with slightly more detail each time? Students will become unable to keep up with the fast-changing world if we don’t adapt to the future and prepare our students for the years to come. School is Sisyphean, the job that the information you learn in school prepares you the most for is becoming a teacher, and that will continue over and over again until we allow more freedom in the classroom. School is out of date with students trying to memorize information to prepare them for the last decade’s jobs. It’s no longer the only place where you can attain information, every single person has everything they need to learn anything on their phone, in their front pocket.
A government provided system of teachers who spend 8 hours a day with kids for years, teaching them, throwing them in a collection of their peers, giving them the basic knowledge to become functioning adults. But that is not what school is, rather, it’s just what it is dressed up as. Public education was created to enforce obedience and social order. With the No Child Left Behind Act, states generate their own manufactured standards of success. In addition to that, The NCLB now forces a higher emphasis on annual testing and report cards, in return, schools where students have high test scores receive more funding. This incentivizes schools to teach their students with the sole purpose of trying to score high on standardized tests. Minimum standards are valuable in order to ensure that all students are able to do basic skills in the workforce. Providing the ability to read, write, and research through school is crucial, but when those skills are tested through SATs, ACTs, SOLS and other Standardized tests, it creates a learning environment in which students are taught tricks and trivia that they forget right after the test is passed. When the standards are the only focus, a society’s critical thinking and creative ability, which is becoming even more important with technology’s growing impact on “basic skills”, is limited. Their efforts result in a competition over who can get into a more prestigious college with a lower acceptance rate than others. There, students pay thousands of dollars so they can follow their passions, but again they need to get good grades, and high test scores, at a school they are going into debt for so they can get a piece of paper, the magical piece of paper that says they are better than others, a degree. This is a vicious cycle.
Despite all societal forces coming together to push students towards an expensive four-year university, NOVA community college and trade schools have had a large uptick in enrolled students post pandemic. This trend is showing the growing discontent of the “Classic” path, and as more students split off from the herd, a change is bound to come to the systems with the greatest influence on the leaders of the future.
