Education

I've been hearing a lot of people advocate a longer school year as a solution to our education problems.

Let me just say this, it will cost lives. I swear to God. I'm not lying. I'm not exaggerating. I'm saying that you will kill children.

Here is why. Teenagers are stressed the fuck out, confused as hell, and their hormones are raging. Most of them are depressed, many are suicidal, and quite a few are violent.

Increasing the workload is not the answer. The problem isn't the volume of education, it's the quality.

I'm not blaming teachers for a second. There are good teachers and bad teachers. If anything is to blame for poor teachers, it's the lack of a competitive salary to encourage more people to become teachers.

But there are serious problems to the educational structure because it is based in an industrial model. Study and lectures are used to condition the product (the student/developing worker), regular assignments are used to provide regular assessment of the effectiveness of the conditioning, and tests are used to.. well, test the product and make sure it is up to code. If not, it is reprocessed.

Basing education on a work model is a very, very bad idea. First of all, it instills the idea that education (despite all the claims to the contrary) is not fun.

Second, the entire school system is used to normalize the five-day, 40-hour work week. The children are conditioned to think this is how it is. Now they'll be conditioned not to expect the summers either.

Do you think they don't know that this school system isn't for them? It's so that American economy can have a workforce.

History is the biggest failure in the American educational system, in large part because it is so self-absorbed and politically manipulated. American history does not spend adequate time explaining the true social causes in many issues because it has a bias towards being "child friendly," which essentially equates to convincing them that America is the greatest country in the world and a bastion for freedom. Culturally, we choose to wait until college to drop the bombshell on them. But more than that, when you are testing for historical knowledge, tests have a bias for absolute measurable answers including dates, people, and places, but the meaning of history is contained in its relations, not its fixed points.

Also, the categorization used to separate knowledge creates a problem in and of itself. Using a simple example: without adequate understanding of chemistry, it is difficult to understand the fundamentals of biology, but biology is taught before chemistry. Why? Because it's taught in alphabetical order. But there is also a problem if the children come to think of biology and chemistry as entirely different things because then they will have trouble seeing the patterns between them and how biology is entirely based on chemistry.

Furthermore, history is integral to all disciplines because knowledge evolves. The shape of modern science or modern literature is based on not only its own history, but it's interactions with other social events. Science, art, war, economics, religion... These aren't separate concepts when they all build and respond to one another like how Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a response to Darwin's The Origin of Species. Or the intimate relationship between philosophy, physics, and religion.

Our discipline based studies are not healthy. The harder we try to force this information into them, the more they will resist. Some are even saying that ADD and ADHD are actually a defense mechanism built to resist programming. They are going to reject it on a very fundamental level, but if they embrace it, they may be even worse off.

If we aren't taught to love learning instead of fear it, we will not embrace true education later in life. If we are taught to think of things as separate instead of integral, we won't see the damage we are causing in one realm of human interest (i.e. industrialization) effecting another (i.e. the environment). This is a shame because education is probably the field most capable of making effective, positive change in every realm of human interest. If we are taught to love America while hiding its faults, we won't recognize the problems that desperately need to be fixed to hold up to those American ideals that we are taught to cherish. If we are taught to obey the standard forty hour work week, we are making the alternatives feel unreal and unobtainable.

But most important, children will die... by their own hand or by their classmate. Of that, I do not doubt.