Education has always been an important topic in the United States. What can be taught in public schools? Should students be forced to attend school? Should schools be segregated? Recently, it seems, public school education has been drastically changing.
American education is focusing less of social studies, and job competition is becoming the most prominent issue. Social studies are an important aspect of an education. It makes students into better citizens by helping them to form informed opinions. It also encourages students to be politically and socially active. A decrease in educational focus on social studies is a likely cause for the increase in political apathy in today’s youth. Part of the reason for the drop in importance of social studies is the demand to meet standardized test quotas. No Child Left Behind is not the cause of the growth in standardized testing. It is most likely a symptom. Many school districts have begun their own standardized testing. And where does this testing focus? Math, science, and reading. The reason for focusing on these three subjects isn’t just to make our country look better. The other reason is for job competition. People, especially parents, are obsessed with how competitive their children will be in the job market. Because of this obsession with economic success in a global economy, we are starting to lose our drive for social and political change. Now, when people think of success, they think of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg rather than Nelson Mandela or Susan B. Anthony. This fact goes hand-in-hand with the decrease in focus on Social Studies.
The largest change has been the increasing push for technology and project-based learning. This seems like a good thing, because the world is shifting towards a greater us of technology, but where is the line drawn? Schools are constantly looking for the “new thing.” They want to find the thing that will revolutionize how classes are taught. This can likely come at the cost of not just money, but the focus on teaching. As a nation with a higher standard of living than most of the world, we try to hide behind our technology. We try to use technology to educate students more efficiently than any other nation, but we don’t realize that the students’ willingness to learn is the key issue. Schools throw money at new things that they think will help students learn. At my school, teachers were pushed to use Moodle.org. This didn’t help with teaching, so they turned to Edmodo.com. This website also failed to aid student and teacher productivity. Schools try to teach their students with things that will supposedly make learning fun, but there is still a need for students’ interest in learning. There may be many factors that have caused a decrease in students’ interest in learning, and it’s possible that there hasn’t been any decrease in students’ in learning, but it all goes back to parents. Most kids don’t spend any time outside of school reading, and they don’t discuss recent issues with their family. While it is likely parents that are responsible for a drop in our academic performance, schools need to stop wasting time and money on things that do not benefit education. Another growing trend is alternatives to normal learning. A common alternative is project-based learning. Project-based learning attempts to teach students by having them work out real-world issues in several large-scale projects. It seems like a good idea, because it requires students to apply their learning. The only problem is that this relies on students’ motivation to learn, which is not a very good thing to rely on.
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