On Schooling

College has not been the normal 4 year endeavor for me. I am finishing my fifth year and by the time I have a degree I will have been there 7 years!.....It's kind of depressing. More of my life has been spent in school than anything else.
This started me wondering about this system I have been a part of for so long. If we, as individuals in society, are going to school for so many years, we should be able to ponder and discuss the state of education. There are several ideas on the subject which I have decided are the most interesting. First, I find the public education system dwindelling and no one seems to be stopping the death of it. Second, is grading really the best way to measure knowledge retention and is testing worth its weight in gold or garbage or anything one might compare it to? Third, alternatives to normal schooling approachs may be far-fetched by could they set about a change that would bring the education system back to where it should be?
Sometime in the near future I will have children. In this train of thought many things come to my mind. One subject in particular is schooling. Where do I want my children to go to school? I live in Arizona currently and I would never (if I can help it) allow my children to be schooled in this state especially if our current governor continues her reign of terror. I know teacher after teacher who lose their jobs simply because they are young and have not played into the system for 50 years. Old tenured wind bags with no right to teach about the dinosaurs they roamed with stay in their posts. Is this right? The new generation needs leaders, they need thinkers, they need new blood. The way we get there is not by having horrible old teachers continuing to beat the same information down their throats. New teachers bring new ideas, new teaching methods, and newer brainpower to the education system yet they are being released. In Arizona, it is because our Governor, the great Jan Brewed decided two areas easy to cut were education and social services. Who thought of this as a good thing? We did not have good budgeting so make it our children who suffer because of it. We do not truly need teachers or social workers. Children should stay in abusive homes and go to over crowded schools. Does the state actually believe this will create a brighter future for Arizona? Most of these children will hate their lives and leave Arizona as soon as possible. Great work everybody! I heard President Obama speak about the Teacher's Union and that he wanted to eliminate old teachers who keep their jobs solely on the fact that they are tenured. He beseeched them and said that he wanted to make sure the best teachers were in school not the oldest. There has been nothing even remotely close to this promise coming to fruition. And what a shame. It is a great idea that would benefit everyone yet no one has to guts to go against the unions, these abominations. They destroy the Democratic process by finding loop holes in laws even to the point that, in the past, bills have been past that have allowed them to use extortion as long as it is directly linked to an employee and their direct employer....so public school is out. I guess it will be private schools who charge as much as Ivy League Universities.
Then, once in school, what should students learn and how should they learn it? I found myself asking this when a co-worker who is working on his Master's degree asked me to help him with a discussion he had to lead on alternatives to modern education. It swayed to Marx and his views on the subject. While I would never say I am Marxist nor ever want to say that, some of the view points in this book were thought provoking. Many people in today's society are not "good at school." Once in the workforce, however, they flourish and become successful in whatever they strive for. Tests are stressful blocks of time in students' lives. Whenever an exam is upon us, the class is stricken and all one sees is a crowd full of concerned faces hoping they studied enough. In most cases, the Professor is the individual upon which your future is dependant. They write the test, they decide the material used. Their power is almost grotesque. I have a class wherein the exams are non-sequitors. My professor types his exams in font that looks like an old beat up typewriter. The questions are obscure to the point where it seems like you have to have read the textbook five times in order to understand them but more importantly it seems that you have to personally know and talk to the professor on a regular basis. It is all very subjective. Do I gain anything through this? Nothing but a contempt for my educator. Thus is how we, as students, get graded. Is there another way? What if there were no grades? What if attendance and participation were the principal modes of education? It would be an interesting experiment. Take a university. Tell all the students their performance in college was completely based on attendance and participation. Whenever in class, teachers presented activities and assignments within the time period allowed that entails the objectives of the class. I feel this change could be monumental. Home work would be eliminated except for small amounts of writing and researching that do not fit the time frame of a class. Get students interested in a subject instead of making them bored with busy work. I have taken at least 35 quizzes and tests this semester alone and it is not over yet. I still have three final exams. The sad part is these exams do mostly nothing for me. Accounting exams and math exams are understandable. Math is best learned through repetition of the steps. Anything else, though, is circumspect. Someone should try it and tell me how it works out.
Could changes such as the one I just explained actually change anything? I sometimes wonder if the United States has set itself on a path that is irreversible. It is quite possible to believe we are on a one-way street with nowhere to turn around. But I would like to think that is not true. Hopefully change can occur and things can get better. I wish that public education is not such a bad term when I actually have children. And hopefully there is a place where my children can go to school that is good and class sizes are relatively small and teachers challenge them. We shall see....