“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education” ~ Albert Einstein

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Education is a simple virtue. Teachers teach, and we students learn. That is the envisioned goal of education, specifically public education; to give knowledge to individuals; and by this, give them power. Education’s mission in its existence is to enrich our minds, give us the steps necessary for both extrinsic and intrinsic advancement, and to give us the tools we need to complete the tasks of life that we want to complete.

This contrasts the reality of public school, however. In my school, whose walls enclose a roaring symphony of motivation towards college, teachers hand me data and processes, then expect me to memorize them so that I can then repeat the data and processes for a test – the same way a retail manager instructs a clerk to use a cash register. I learn nothing. In my school, who boasts success behind the ramparts of a mistaken agenda, I am taught that to be a person who has a life that matters in society, I have to absorb all the words and numbers spat on me by my classes to punch grades into a grade book, and go on to college, then to a vain career whose complacency lies in its paycheck. In this present state of logic for our school districts and school boards, life is about getting a job that pays for our sports car and summer home. That is the suspected end result of all of us; to make money. Money. Money. Money. Repeat. Die. For me to give in to this process and the notion thereof, and expect anything else in life but money and death is to be, by literal definition, insane. So, for the sake of my own insanity, I do expect more from life than money and death as should any conscious human being.

Students fill gaps: Filling in blanks is exactly what I do in class, and filling in blanks is exactly what school does with me. They fill seven desks with my presence every day until I am pushed from them to the stage at which I am handed my diploma. They fill 15 to 30 spaces to enter numbers, or as put by school, “grades” for each class every 6 weeks. They fill things so that they can quantify them, and with such quantities, schools can present the numbers to a man in a suit in order to receive more funding, statistical satisfaction, and appraisal. I am an individual who in rationality can be counted, but by heart, should be more than a number’s value.

School has become a dancing of numbers. What was sought to be an environment for growth and advancement has become a ballroom bumping with the arbitrary noise that is the work they give us – noise that harmonizes wretchedly with the motions of numbers from one person’s statistics to another, richer person’s statistics. The noise has become so loud that we have gone deaf, and numb, and painfully satisfied with the stupid, meaningless lyrics being jammed into our ear canals that transmit waves of nothingness until we forget that they are hurting us. We don’t realize the detriment that plagues our society because we are used to it.

The actual goal of public education is to produce robots that serve a function to a system. We are not growing, but being created – crafted – forged – into what our governments would like to allow us to be! We learn the same standardized curriculum the same way a computer programmer creates a program to be installed in all personal computers. The sad part is that we are aware of our condition, whereas computers are not; yet, we, like machines, coast on the assembly line of public school education until we are the final product of the lacking schematics of the school pathway, all wrapped with luster and false momentum, but without any living part of us to transcend into the world.
If this is learning, what have we for education? A continuity of this current didactic approach to education will create a nation deprived of the power of knowledge. We will raise a nation of individuals with knowledge, but no intelligence. Intelligence leads to knowledge. We need a nation of thinkers – not knowers, because it is thinkers who identify possibility, and it is thinkers who make the world a better place.

Our society will lack the competence necessary for an evolving world because our minds will be so accustomed to enforced pity rudimentary applications of the powerful organ sitting inside all of our skulls. We will waste away the opportunity given to all of us at birth by decelerating the inertia of our ambitions, and constraining the magnitudes of our thoughts with blank tasks that pose to our values a waste of time. The more countless time we spend doing something you could teach a monkey to do, the more time we will remain stagnant as a creature. We need to evolve, and become, and not simply be. Time does not wait for anyone, and it certainly will not wait for the way our education system works to cohere to that of the intellectual evolution necessary for us to continue the progress of mankind as a species entirely.

Radical change is essential. Not only as a school, but as a community and a population, we need to completely rethink the way in which we educate the youth. The future, along with all of the contingent prosperity it entails, is reliant on the intuition of the little leaders developing in campuses today.

I propose change.

The solution is simple: recreate the mission of education. Take a paradigm shift towards the value of attaining knowledge that affects you in all dimensions and the power that comes with it, and away from preparing us to make money. Money is a supplement to proactivity. It should by no means be the focus of education like it is currently.

The first step towards recreating education is to rid it of all numbers. Take away scores and grades. They are theoretically logical; set to give everyone a quantitative measure of their mastery of an objective; but are fallible in practice because you cannot measure quantitatively the conscious understandings of someone’s psyche. Instead, implement a pass or fail system to each class. This will defuse the problem of working solely to achieve a high grade but not understanding the material, and will, just as beautifully, free teachers of the hours upon hours which they spend grading papers – a task worthy of a machine. Teachers will then have more time to construct better lesson plans that revolve around ensuring that students aptly understand the material instead of lesson plans that revolve around getting a certain score on the next test. Students, now free of the encumbrance of grades, will be able to focus more on the goal of mastering an objective, and less upon having a high number ascribed to their name on some paper. This reflects the root of education in its most fundamental form because it promotes learning at its most fundamental form.

The second step is to rid education of tests, standardized or not. They too attempt to address a number to measure a student’s conscious understanding. Instead, implement “applications” in which knowledge can be expressed more effectively than answers and questions stapled together. Mastery of an objective will be concluded by the successful application of knowledge given to students by their teachers. Applications can be, for example, a demonstration by a student of the swiping away of a sheet of paper cleanly from under a mug to show that inertia is pulling downward on the mug and explaining it, or a student rewriting the stanzas of popular poem to show his or her understanding of poetic form. The greater the duration and amount of material, the more vastly proportional the application can be. An objective of a sociology class could be passed by the application of researching a group of people, hypothesizing a theory, and then testing it in a field study, whether the theory proves accurate or not. These applications will be more fun to complete, and will motivate those unenthusiastic few. They will allow for a greater retention of the material that would have otherwise only been memorized to survive the next test. Also, such applications will promote active problem solving and cognitive thinking (versus aimless memorization of data), as well as higher order thinking and substantial brain stimulation.

The third step towards evolving education is rid of grade classifications. They hold back the intuitive few who excel in their academics by restricting their academic capacity to their grade level, and give students who are slower developers a feeling of incompetence because they are not suited for a number’s standards. Students are people. All people are different. Why label them without uniqueness? I am clearly surpassed my grade level’s standard of skill in Language Arts, yet I am forced to coast on the assembly line of the 11th grade curriculum which has piqued in me a plateau of progress. And the only way for me to advance is to endure a credit by exam test, which entails mere draconian time and work, but not thinking or learning. This means that, by riding this current plateau of intelligence, I am wasting time, remaining at a stalemate in life, making no forward progress neither intrinsically or extrinsically. Instead, have students classes based on their specific position in the ladder of academics. So a math-lover can take calculus when he excels in pre-calculus, and can take lower level English, where he lacks aptitude. This will cause that student to be immersed in his passion, and also be at a level of English that matches his skill level so that he can actually improve from the present instead of coasting by with a C and never advancing in the English field of academic subjects.

These small steps for mankind can revolutionize the way education works in America for the better. Education’s mission will be to break light into the young minds of our nation, which will allow for a development of life that focuses more on the why than the what, and will thereby advance the society of the future by comprising it of an array of thinkers who may: figure a cure for cancer, solve the energy crisis, or find a way for us to thrive on mars. These simple paradigm shifts will nurture the oncoming individuals who will shape human possibility as we know it with institutions parallel to that of Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein. These steps, solely for the purpose of advancement, will progress us from the breathing placeholders of the universe that we are into a far greater point in organic existence.