An Outdated System: Education from the Perspective of a Student
By: Dylan Barrett
Tags: Kids, Funding, Educa, Technology

Photo from https://www.dreamstime.com/illustration/education-collage.html

We forget 40% of the content we learn in schools. Yet, we use only 37% of what we remembered in everyday life, according to a study done by H&R Block. There is a simple truth for kids in America. The Education system is not working. It was built for kids 100 years ago, in order to breed factory workers during the industrial revolution. Evidently we no longer live in that time period. Now we live in a modernized world with the most technologically stimulated generation the world has seen. A change requires an update and continuous update in order to teach kids in the fastest growing society. To inform kids about the biggest societal, environmental, and political problems we need to change our outdated school system and how we teach kids.

Since I was in Pre-K I have loved school. I loved seeing my friends, collaborating with them, but I especially loved learning. I remember the feeling as I memorized my first multiplication table in the first grade. I spent my reading time studying it by myself in order to succeed. I presented it by memory in front of my classmates; facing my fear of public speaking and earning myself a candy bar in the process. That first candy bar fueled my hunger for learning. A hunger that has since then died out.

Now I’m currently going through the High school education system. I can see that there are major foundational problems in the way that my peers and I are taught. Some of these problems arise from technology, but most are from the outdated ways we learn. It’s extremely difficult to maintain students’ attention when so many things are happening around us. Just look at phone usage. Which is the first thing we do when class is over, and most kids sneak it during class too. That’s because to us kids, our phones are more interesting than class. Especially with social media. However, the education system was built to teach kids who lived during the industrial revolution. Kids who had never seen a phone in their life. Therefore, we feel like we can’t relate to the content anymore. We lose interest. Likewise, there is a growing belief amongst my peers and I. We feel that most of the content we learn is useless after graduation. Consequently, to my generation, school has become more about passing than learning. This loss of interest coupled with a worldwide connection effectively breeds the largest academic dishonesty our school system has ever faced. A problem that without more resources, we are not ready to solve.

Photo from https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/04/cover-kids-screens

Experts like Seth Godin and Ken Robinson agree that our school system was designed during the Industrial Age. With Industrial Age values of mass production and mass control that still run deep in the roots of our schools. Sophia Takrouri, shows how the rote learning style based off repetition and memorization was made to create prospective factory workers.“They were being taught to follow and remember basic commands, which was vital in a factory setting” (Takrouri). The fact that it is still the primary learning style in America schools shows how outdated our school system really is. More evidence of this is the how our entire day is run by bells, we have assigned spots, and we are only rewarded if we behave well. These are Industrial Age values that would dictate the success of workers in a factory. Not kids in a technologically advanced society.

On average kids get a phone by age 10. Additionally, 25% of those kids have it by age 6, according to a survey done on 1,000 Americans by Panda Security. This proves to be an enormous problem that our schools simply can’t combat without strict regulations. Educational and Developmental psychologist, Kelly Allen, illustrates that phones can be a major distraction. “Kuznekoff and Titsworth found that students who did not use smartphones while participating in a lecture wrote 62 per cent more information in their notes and were able to recall more information than their phone-using counterparts” (Allen). Clearly phone use affects how students pay attention during class. Kelly continues by showing a subsequent study that had similar results. “Students who did not use their mobile phones, or used them for class-related content, earned higher grades and scored higher on information recall than students who used their phone for unrelated purposes” (Allen). Evidently phone usage directly correlates with success in school. As american children increasingly get phones at a younger age, it distracts them from learning. This early technological stimulation coupled with the ineffective way of teaching instills a lack of attention in academics at an early stage in the learning process.

Another problem is the continuous feeling in graduates that the content we learn is useless. Schools are intended to prepare kids for the outside world. A world that is changing very rapidly. Journalist Ben Renner highlights the biggest problems with educational content. “Researchers found the average educated American forgets about 40% of what they learned, and uses just 37% of the knowledge and skills in their everyday lives on average” (Renner). This confirms that there is a growing belief that most of the content we learn in school has no value in the outside world and job market. This is very detrimental because students lose faith in the purpose of their education. Unfortunately, I did as well. As a student it feels illogical that I know the Headline of Pennsylvania 200 years ago and that chlorophyll makes plants green. But I don’t know how to manage my time and money properly or how to get a mortgage.

Critics of educational reform may argue that there are much more pressing problems that require our time and resources. However in order to fix those problems we need to educate our kids about them. Our schools also need much more resources in order to see a successful update. I’m not just talking about improving school lunches. Our teachers should be given more updated teaching skills and much higher pay. Roughly half of teachers report feeling under great stress several days a week. Job satisfaction is at a 25-year low. And almost a third of teachers say they are likely to leave the profession within the next five years. Our teachers are underpaid and undervalued. This is a problem because kids thrive in classes where teachers take the initiative to help them and teach in different ways then our system requires them to. Unfortunately that number is low when teachers are struggling with time to teach their students at all, they feel they need to rely on the system that clearly does not work.

Critics could also argue that school budgeting is spread thin. They could say that there simply isn’t enough in the National budget to pay for the millions of kids in America. Contrastly, there are major problems with government spending. Schools are given 64 billion dollars per year, while the military is given a whopping 712 billion. School’s budget could be doubled without making a dent in it’s military counterpart. Anti-reformists might also bring up the fact that school funding varies by state. Of course, this means people who have higher property values pay higher taxes; therefore, more money is funneled into their local schools. This creates large discrepancies in the quality of education, arguing that this could be standardized in any way is sugar coating reality. Shockingly, this isn’t always the case. For instance, take Texas. 65% of their education bill is paid by property owners. Jennifer Sapio, summarizes an article by the Texas tribune showing how poorer communities are taxed at a higher rate than their wealthy counterparts. “Fifty percent of poor districts, according to Swaby, are already capped at the maximum tax rate of $1.17 per $100 worth of property value. Meanwhile, sixty percent of wealthy districts only pay $1.04 per $100, a mere 4 cents above the legal minimum contribution to the education budget” (Sapio). Clearly you aren’t able to change the way the economic policies that fund local schools; yet, there is obviously a major problem in the way these policies are executed. The example of Texas is a mere leaf in the trunk of systemic discrimination working against poorer communities ingrained into the education system, masquerading behind the means of capitalism.

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau 2016 Annual Survey of School System Finances

It’s clear that the American Education system is outdated and doesn’t work for our Students nor our Teachers. It needs to be changed from it’s Industrial Age values, and money from the national budget must be diverted to aid this change. Otherwise we won’t be able to tackle large scale societal problems like climate change or systemic racism that pollutes the environmental, justice, and education systems. So my fellow students, now is the time to change it. Instead of giving up on schools and failing your classes, I challenge you to tell your parents, teachers, and politicians that this isn’t working. 2020 has been a year of much change. Now there needs to be even more.