I wish…
…I was brave enough, or enlightened enough to come up with something like this when I was in this kid’s position, rather than the by-the-numbers crap ‘n platitudes speech I did end up giving.
Outside of a little bit of tone that only a terribly bright eighteen year-old who hasn’t seen much of the world yet can manage, as a person in his mid-thirties with a couple of degrees and a reasonable amount of experience under his belt, I have to say that this kid’s mostly got it right; so much of the public school system is more about establishing societal order than it is about actually encouraging real learning, especially in this age of “standards of learning” and the ubiquity of standardized testing.
I wouldn’t say that my public school education was a total write-off, but the lessons I learned were more about learning to divine what a given authority wanted and feeding it to them than it was much about developing critical thinking – and having that skill under my belt, I was better equipped to actual learn stuff when I got to college.
That was fine for me, I guess, but a lot of people don’t even get that out of being there. Some go on to write symphonies and invent VERY IMPORTANT THINGS™, though most folks end up simply struggling because they got out of school without actually learning much.
No wonder our country is falling behind the rest of the world in academic development, and more and more standardized testing that continues to lower the baseline levels further every year isn’t going to fix that.
