Fixing a Broken Education System
Just Scrap It Entirely and Start Over
That perhaps sounds a little too drastic to many. However, having been a grade school teacher in a private school in Los Angeles in the 1970s, I do know a little bit of what I speak. Let us just consider the unfortunate status quo of grades K to 12 in this country in our public schools. That is quite a spectrum, from highly rated based on quality (highly affluent communities) to abysmal plagued by drugs, gangs, gun violence.
My own alma mater, which was a top rated public school in the state when I attended, was (and perhaps still is) plagued in recent years by a heroin ring. Campus shootings? Just a symptom of the underlying problems. Just a matter of bullying? How is bullying going on with there being ostensibly adult supervision in those schools? Same way as it happened when us baby boomers were growing up. Throw a bunch of kids of any age together and they will behave like the primates they are, with a pecking order and social hierarchy. To expect any other sort of behavior is just being delusional.
We went from the typical one room 19th century school house on the frontier to the system we have today, government subsidized and kept afloat by our property taxes. What about the teachers themselves. There are two that are most memorable for me from my education, one who I had for 4th and 5th grade and another from 7th & 8th grades. The former was Swiss and I have an album she made of German folk songs. She would bring her acoustic guitar in and we would have group sing alongs of folk songs and some of them Bob Dylan songs. The latter taught us the basics of Einstein's theories of relativity in 8th grade. Unfortunately, they were not representative of the average teacher of that era, who were pretty much stodgy and nondescript. No offense to those in the profession, but it is about opening the eyes of students with the torch of knowledge, to quote a Sanskrit text on being a teacher.
Given the current mess that people are trying their best to address, marching for tighter gun control laws and teachers striking for better pay are really not going to make any difference, not really. We have a way now for children and teens to learn at their own pace via courses online. We also have a way for them to have meaningful social interactions without the bullying environment. There is this excellent site call meetups, which many of us use to find out about events related to our professions that we would want to attend. That and others like it could be a vehicle for sports, gaming, debate, chess clubs et al. The classroom itself? It does not need brick and mortar buildings anymore. No need to tax us to death to maintain those. Platforms like Skype, Zoom, Gotomeeting are perfectly equipped for teachers to interact with students in cyberspace.