While I am not a professional, I'm not a teacher, I haven't studied extensively on the subject of education in America, I am a current student. I have been home schooled. I have attended a public middle school where the classes rotate in different orders every day using a ten-day plan (much like a blocked schedule, but with shorter periods and every class every day with the rotation of elective classes on "even" and "odd" days). I have attended a high school that uses a blocked schedule as well as a high school that uses "fixed" schedules. While I am not a professional, I can speak for almost every kind of education except for a public elementary school and the private school systems.
These kids that are coming up through the system, they are the future of America. They are the future leaders and the future Presidents, Governors, Senators, Representatives, Ambassadors, CEOs, Teachers, Engineers, and Scientists. How we form and mold their education is how we mold the future America. How we raise them and what we set them up for is how we raise and set up America to be.
Education. Is. Important.
When I look at the education in China and in Japan, and I look at my alma mater, at where my friends are now, merely a year from high school graduation, and when I look at the kids coming up through the elementary schools and middle school in my hometown, I am almost ASHAMED. What are we teaching these kids?
For the "richest," most-powerful country in the world, we are setting ourselves up for failure. We are no longer expecting excellence from our students, we are expecting mediocrity. Like begets like. We set our kids up for mediocrity, the country will become mediocre.
President Obama constants tweets that the children of America are our future and that we should invest in them. I agree whole-heartedly. However, governors across the country are cutting education budgets where there is very little left to cut. In some of the areas that they are cutting budgets, they might as well tell the kids not to come to school - the teachers will be more underpaid, the books are falling apart, the school is dilapidated and falling apart. Is that how we want our country to look in twenty years? Falling apart with no hope of recovery because these kids haven't been taught to fight, to be better?
I want my children (when I have them) to know that they are smart, to know what they are worth, to know that collectively, the future of our country rests on their shoulders, and to know that they are well-prepared and capable to do the job that has been placed on their shoulders. At the rate we are going now, I feel that we will never get there. Maybe it will take a fall for us to bring ourselves up again. This country was founded on a fall, and we turned out to be the greatest and to prevail against those struggles time and time again. What if we don't let history repeat itself? What if we cut it off at the beginning before history repeats itself?
