Educating people to be critical thinkers who don’t just accept what they’re taught but challenge it is the primary responsibility of the educational system in their daily lives. If students are to survive in this world, they must first learn the skills and intelligence necessary to grasp it. American education has been known to produce students who lack a basic understanding of the world and its peoples. This is because the existing educational system does not encourage critical thinking and instead teaches people to be “docile” workers in an economy that benefits the status quo while leaving “others” in poverty. We can see the problem by looking at the wide range of curriculums and disciplines being taught. Academic learning is undervalued, and the only thing that counts are the results of high-stakes tests. As a result, American public schools are now overrun with ambiguous curricula that believe children will be better prepared for the global society of the future, whatever that may be.
We were talking about how African-Americans were treated forty years ago, and I was astounded by her ignorance on the matter, given that she had a college degree and was herself of African-American ancestry. We were both shocked. When I started college, I was eager to study African and African-American history from a perspective that didn’t make them seem like slaves, and college gives students the opportunity to do so. I couldn’t help but wonder if she had taken any history or sociology lessons; from her conversation, it appeared she had not. However, the sad reality is that the majority of people attend college in order to gain a financial advantage rather than to broaden their outlook.
There are various ways in which the educational system in this country might be reorganised to produce pupils who are not ignorant of the country’s history and the world around them. Like school attendance, parental involvement in the education of their children should be a must in order for them to receive a diploma. The existing educational system is failing because of a lack of parental involvement. Parents need to teach their children that a lack of education will have a negative impact on their future. If a teacher is able to take a student to the tops of Mount Olympus and Antarctica, he or she is doing their job correctly. Disciplining students and acting as a babysitter take up a significant portion of teachers’ class time, even though neither of these activities is part of their job description. When it comes to education, parental involvement is essential, and it all begins at home.
The educational system’s funding should be changed as well. The traditional method of financing public education in the United States is through property taxes, resulting in an extremely unequal distribution of educational opportunities. Richer communities are able to provide better educational resources for their children than poorer ones. As a result, both urban and rural students’ educational experiences are negatively impacted. Due to the mandated testing and public reporting of results, the No Child Left Behind Act will only exacerbate the situation. Parents desire to move to an area where their children’s schools have high test scores when they are looking to buy a new house. Affluent families can no longer afford to live in the best school districts because of the rising property values. As a result, more property taxes will be levied on those locations, while lower-performing schools will lose their federal support. Taxes on education should not be dependent solely on the property taxes paid by landowners. State and local governments send most of the government funds to schools, and there are enormous discrepancies in financing based on race. More than $1,000 per student in the United States is spent on education by large states like New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania because of their inability to fund education fairly, according to Joel Spring’s book American Education (Spring, pg. 77). Children should not be disadvantaged because of their socioeconomic status or ethnicity, and public schools should not make any distinctions based on race or class. Every student enrolled in a public school should receive an equal opportunity to succeed academically. Teachers would benefit from equal funding, which would allow them to better educate their students. As part of my approach, the federal government will fully and evenly fund and tightly monitor the American educational system, making school choice and privatisation moot. Schools would change greatly for the better if the government pumped more money into the system, as that is the primary problem in most public schools: a lack of funds.
Curriculum changes would be made to accommodate the country’s diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. From elementary to high school, children learn only about affluent, white men as if women and other minorities don’t exist or contribute anything meaningful to the history of America. Because they are unable to identify with the characters in the story, children are unable to remember historical truths. Students should be forced to take classes that teach them about the history of oppressed and marginalised people in the United States and around the world. That’s why they should have to read novels that make them think, rather than just regurgitate facts for the next test. Governments could no longer deceive people into thinking that everything was OK and that their leaders were competent if more pupils were aware of other people’s beliefs, values, and cultures. There would be no high stakes testing because most tests are devised by persons who have little idea about the demographics, ethnicities or economic backgrounds of the kids to be assessed, and most tests are prejudiced against minorities and the poor.. Parents will not be charged for additional instruction if pupils are tested.