#school reformation

[brettdoesdiscourse]

Something I very distinctly remember from high school was a kid asking a math teacher how often we would actually use something we were learning in real life. And this woman looked him dead in the face, in completely 100% seriousness, and do you know what she said?

"I use it every day."

Surely the math teacher will not have a biased view of how often the average person will use a math concept.

[luvalilwriter-blog]

Dear my Daughter, Week Four

With my recent move from the northern half of the country to the southern, I have been forced to readjust yet again to another school (proving to be my ninth placement of academia in the last five years) and also to redefine the meaning and impact of education that I hold dear to my heart. I fear there is simply no other way to approach this particular topic without being absolutely straightforward and direct in both opinion - and insult.

I can no longer find the countless number of school systems in the USA to be reliable, and that is disheartening because the youths that represent our futures will someday be a result of this system; you will inevitably become a result of this system. Someday, your moldable, innocent mind will be settled into one of these facilities and I will be forced to watch as you conform into the unreasonable expectation the country, and the world, has of you. I will be forced to watch as you bend and bow under the weight of your predecessors’ knowledge.

The world has steadily advanced over the past hundred years to the point where we now produce billions of bytes worth of new information each day, but we are slowly but steadily becoming less and less prepared for the product of humanity’s advancement. Each day, children are learning things at younger and younger ages. How many toddlers now know how to access a tablet application? Children are learning to read, write, count, and speak comprehensively earlier and earlier because they have to! There’s no choice!

If children don’t pick things up like the snap of a finger, they will be left behind, forever grasping at the dust their peers choke them with. It’s grown to the point where I, as a teenager and soon to be adult, do not feel capable of considering myself an “adult” at the age of eighteen years old. My high school(s) will have taught me advanced academics such as but not limited to the following classes: Anatomy and Physiology Honors, College and Career oriented Computer-Technology Literacy Certification Course, English Honors, AutoCAD: Engineering and Architectural Designing, etc.

Yet still, no where in my schooling career will I have been taught how to write my resume, how to apply for a job, how to apply to a college, how to apply for government funding or scholarships, how to open a bank account, how to budget my money appropriately, how to go about purchasing a car or a home, or where to look for resources when I may need them. The United States expects us to suddenly go from being children to fully self-sustaining adults on the magical chime of a biological clock.

We go from legal responsibility of a guardian, to suddenly floundering amidst a mudslide with no place to look and no foothold. On our eighteenth birthday (coincidentally the year most teenagers graduate high school), we are no longer children and it's treated as a date to be celebrated, to be cheered and fawned over. Then why do I feel such trepidation towards that looming date? How can I look forward to something that terrifies me so horribly?

The school wants us to be well rounded so we may have a fighting chance in this damning world so we might survive but we are not beings who can learn things without being taught. Children are not capable of sprouting new information on the dime when it’s called for. The school teaches us quadratics when we ought to learn how to save that dime.

Love,

Your Teen Mom