Christopher Diaz/Opinion Editor
As the semester draws to an end, I see fellow students scurrying to catch up on material for impending exams. Their focus and purpose is to get that A or B, or whatever it is they feel they need for advancement.
This seems counter-intuitive and contributes to our decline in education, especially when compared to the rest of the world. Yet, it isn’t simply a matter of standards; we have been going about education in a way that does not leave students educated.
For many in the U.S., school is about meeting certain markers. Whether you are an A student or a C student, school is about obtaining a certain grade so you can move forward.
As we grow up, we realize that school rewards students not for what they know, but how well they perform on exams or homework. At the end of the year, what matters is grades, not knowledge.
The logic seems to be that the higher the grade is, the more one knows. Yet, this is not the case. Even in gifted, honors and AP courses in high school, I saw that most students with excellent grades knew little. Students learn how to study for exams and retain the information only long enough to use it for the exam.
In high school, we were not learning, we were memorizing. The knowledge gained vaporized soon after each exam.
If we were learning anything, it was how to be test-taking machines. That appears to be the goal, as standardized exams such as the FCAT became the focus of curriculum in primary education across the nation.
If primary education’s mandate was to prepare myself and others for college, it failed. If primary education’s mandate was to graduate educated and knowledgeable students, it again failed. I saw seniors graduate when they barely had an 8th grade reading level.
To this day, I come across students at FIU who are frustrated when professors severely mark down their papers. They are told to go to writers’ workshops to improve. These students are the product of a failed educational system.
Different solutions for our educational problem have been put forth. Some argue for more efforts to control behavior and corral students. To be sure, if students are gravely misbehaving then the environment is not conducive to learning.
But when an education strategy is more focused on dress code and attendance policy, then there is a clear message that is being sent: primary schools find education secondary. This is what has led some people to the conclusion that primary education is not at all about learning, but rather is a factory for workers.
Others argue for more teacher accountability. Yet, if their curriculum is highly controlled by administrators, then this argument, at least to some degree, is making a scapegoat of our teachers.
Our education system really hasn’t changed in the last hundred years while the world has.
Radical change to our educational system is necessary, though it should not happen overnight. We should reevaluate whether the grading system actually facilitates learning. Perhaps it needs to be reassessed because, as it is right now, it does nothing to encourage learning.
Teacher’s unions, school boards and other bureaucratic bodies that serve more as clogs than agents of improvement should be reevaluated and, if found to be impediments, eliminated entirely.
We must take a realistic look at our current education system. We must also be willing to experiment, to try new and different things. Some of them won’t work, but that is necessary to find what does. “There is no such thing as failure, but only feedback,” as I’ve been told.
We have plenty of feedback to know what we have now isn’t working if students are expected to be educated and prepared.
We must be pragmatic in our efforts for improvement and never be satisfied. Otherwise we’ll grow complacent and find ourselves with generations that can barely read and write, making them obsolete in the information age.
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