Education Nation: the Trouble With American Schooling
The idea of writing this essay came to me when a friend came out of the girl's bathroom at a K-12 “alternative school” I attended for two years. She told me that while she was using the restroom one of the 7th graders stumbled into the stall next to her, slammed the door shut, and began to wretch vodka, hard cider, and chunks of microwaved school lunch. When my friend got out of the bathroom and told me this, we halfheartedly chuckled about this because it happened on a daily basis, it was just normal. Laughter gradually turned to disgust, disgust for ourselves because we have been so desensitized to something so disturbing, disgust for whatever created...this. That girl's bathroom over the years has seen enough vomit, angst, smoke, booze, pills, coke, razors, blood and tears all flushed away to fill a swimming pool and we have the nerve to laugh.
What creates this?
In middle school and through my first year of high school, when I went to my classes there were many days I was filled with an overwhelming sadness. Four years I was trapped in a vacuum, void of inspiration, individuality, and life. Packaged meat categorized by social status and grade proficiency, all tightly packed into sardine-can classrooms. Glassy eyed, sleep deprived, copy machines, fed textbooks, medication, and microwave lunches. I held a vision of living the same day again and again only to fall asleep at night feeling empty and unfulfilled my entire school life waiting for adulthood to save me. Only to work the same day until I die and fill my unfulfilled heart that I mistake for a wine g =lass that needs filling, that vision I think filled me with enough fear through these four years to drive me to make impulsive decisions, some that I am very proud of and some that I am ashamed of, but ultimately made me into a more experienced person.
Four years I was trapped in a vacuum, void of inspiration, individuality, and life.
Drugged.
I was put on ritalin in elementary school for my ADHD. For those who don't know, on the street ritalin is also kiddie coke, speed, or uppers. I was an energetic kid that hated being kept indoors and most of the time could not sit still. I still am. Stimulants are prescribed to children with attention deficit disorders to burn them out and give them so much energy that they just collapse. Hard drug users know all about this comedown or gelling period where the mind goes numb in effort to regain its energy. The “focus” and regained concentration that these medications are so highly spoken for are really zombification, making the child too out of it to focus on the world around them but just aware enough to read what’s on the board and write it down word for word like a good little copy machine. One of my heroes, George Carlin, said, “Don’t just teach children to read, teach them to question what they read, teach them to question everything.” The CCHR (nonprofit mental health watchdog) says the total number of children and adolescents 0-17yrs on psychiatric drugs in the United States is roughly 8,389,034. What bothers me the most about this is that 4,404,360, more than half of those kids are on ADHD medications, which are almost never prescribed because of troubles at home, but at school. Nature doesn’t screw up a batch of 4,404,360 kids.
By putting them all on medications I believe we are attacking the effect of the problem, not the cause, which is the failing institution itself. It sounds just like our perverse backward way of thinking to try to cut off a few toes rather than just find a bigger shoe.
The U.S. Department of Education says schools are educating the future of America. I say it is forcing young people into restrictive roles and stunting the development of their full potential. Although a great deal of learning is necessary, a great deal of it is not.
-Original art by Rowan
The necessary and unnecessary components are completely dependent the individual. My belief is that the current education system is so poorly organized it’s a sad, sad joke. I won’t make the mistake of not taking into regard the students who, unlike myself, and the students I fell into cliques with, thrive in mainstream schooling. This, after all, would be a generalization of cognitive development which is what I am making it my case to attack as the root of the problem in our current education system. This generalization of the way and what children ought to learn leaves the countless others who don’t fit into this mold feeling inferior and inadequate to the world around them and understandably feel like something is wrong with them. This feeling can sometimes remain strong into adulthood.
...it is forcing young people into restrictive roles and stunting the development of their full potential.
Why are younger and younger people feeling the need to give up on school and even life itself? I could list eight friends who attempted suicide in middle school through early high school and twice as many who contemplated doing so. Interestingly, fourteen out of sixteen of these people identify as female. To take a look at the monster sleeping under our noses that I am trying to illuminate I have to break it into little bite sized chunks because it's a big one.
Sleep deprivation.
As teens develop, their internal clock falls back two hours. The average teenager falls asleep at 11:00pm and requires eight to ten hours of sleep to fully function. So waking up at 7:00am to make it by 8:30 is taxing on the mind and body, especially if the student staying up extra late to catch up on missed work or study for a test, then having to drag themselves out of bed at seven in the morning. Naturally, they are going to feel like a walking corpse by the time they get to school. I am convinced that energy drink companies are fully aware of this and actively exploit exhausted students. Studies have shown regular sleep deprivation causes alarming detriment to brain activity, stress, and even depression. Caffeine and other stimulant drugs do not improve this, as a brain that needs sleep will begin to shut down even if the body is still moving. Schools should fix this and start school later and have shorter days with fewer classes leaving more time afterschool for free study of choice and only assign classes and homework in high school relating to the individual student's personal interests to avoid overcrowded classrooms full of student who would rather be learning other subjects.
Deindividualization.
You can’t be reasonably angry at a student for not concentrating or showing interest in a subject they never asked to learn. There are just too many important subjects and too many students with individual interests and capabilities to teach them all the same curriculum. Students spend all day learning things that most of the time they absolutely do not care about. They complain that they will never use this information, and although many of them will, they don’t have the choice not to because it has been taken from them. There are poets, painters, musicians, biologists, and philosophers that learn more in the few hours they are granted in their bedrooms reading books, drawing, and playing instruments than they do in an entire year of dozing off in class repeating the same information and staring out the window dreaming of the day when they can be free to live their lives and experience the world.
The forceful and damaging ways that all schools execute the learning process (in both connotations) have horrified me over the years. I have known countless people who love learning from the deepest depths of their soul, but are absolutely disgusted by schools and their ignorance and cluelessness as to what a developing mind really needs to grow. It makes no sense to me to teach the same curriculum to all students when everyone is born with different minds and skill sets and then expect them to all stay put and enjoy it when you yank them away from their natural learning environment and plug them into a force feeding tube of regurgitated information.