Changing Education
We are behind other nations in education. This is not one person or one groups doing however, it is a team effort as a country and there need to be real conversations on how we create a better educational system. These need to happen with the 4 major contributors in education all present and talking about solutions and current problems. These are the students, teachers, administrators, and parents.
Students would like to see a later starting school day and less homework. parents want their student less stressed and better equipped for the real world. Administrators want happier students who cause less problems and who make the teacher’s job easier, while teachers want to teach the material effectively and to students who care. In his article about education, Botstein writes about how he feels we are wasting our students time based on how other countries are doing things. He goes into detail about how only 47% of the average high schoolers time is spent on core subjects during the school day, which is half of what the countries who are smarter than us are doing. In recent years there have been fights about art in school and it importance and the cost is being felt of demonstrations taking time away from core classes to make art and extracurriculars mandatory. It is being felt in other classes in which people are unable to spend the necessary time in.
Less homework would be a result of more time spent in class on core subjects. The arts would not lose out if we had more time on other subjects, because students would have more free time outside of school to accomplish their own personal wishes. A meaningful conversation in how students spend their time must be had or we will continue to fall behind until we reach a point where nothing can really be done.
Simon,
Great post. I liked how you talked about the viewpoints of the four major groups in education – students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Sometimes it can feel like they all want different things, and even though everyone is just wanting what’s best for the students, these four groups often have opposing ideas of what’s “best,” like you wrote about. I found an article talking about what the US can learn from other countries’ education system: https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2011/05/25/us-can-learn-from-other-countries-education-systems . If you ever expanded on this topic, a compare and contrast on other countries’ schools vs. American schools would be interesting to read.