By Proteendream (16, Washington)
I’m writing this article coming from one of the best private high schools in my area. It’s known for its academic success, athletic excellence and great university prep. It’s a perfect example of the strict, standardized and model school. I do notably well in this environment; I’ve been raised in it, but I’m against it. In some regards, my school pushes everyone further than other schools in its “league.” Our freshmen take biology while other remarkably good schools in the area require sophomores to take it. An average GPA at this school is 4.0 and if you fall below it, you’re part of the small minority that doesn’t have it. Most girls in my school, even with a 4.0, have developed a hatred for this school since halfway through freshman year. My school is nothing but an exaggerated example of what every school is trying to be, and the students are everything the school system in this country wants them to be.
Bottom line is our school system is based on tests and the passing of that kind of material to determine if you’ll be “successful” in life. What are these tests made of? English, math and reading.
The requirements for graduation in my state are limited to basically English, math, science, history and that’s about it. What does this do for us? Well now I know the difference between a noun and a verb. I can define a trapezoid. I know what an amoeba is, and I can say I passed a test on 30 pages worth of history about absolutism in one country. I do not doubt the significance or importance of these courses. They’re needed for our passage into college.
Oh, wait, why? Because that’s what the tests are on. The No Child Left Behind Act is supposed to educate all students to
the fullest of their potential. But what does this mean? Their potential in what? Their potential in the material of standardized tests. These tests supposedly help “predict” how a person will do in college and in the rest of life. So when we’re in class learning about geometric figures, the sentence structure of Shakespeare’s lines and the linguistics of words, our teachers might tell us, “This will help you incredibly on the test.” Girls in my school take a linguistics course just to do well on the vocabulary section on the SAT.Now while hard-pressed chemistry and calculus classes are all nice and sound good to parents who want their children to succeed, they’re somewhat unrealistic for the everyday student. High school is meant to prepare us for the real world, but it is far from the real world. Of all the “classic” courses of high school the most significant to me is history. Through learning history, particularly European and American history, we can understand the development of important political structures and better understand our current political and societal situation. One also begins to see patterns in the behaviors of important leaders through learning about history as well. Why is this important? Because we live in a democracy in which every person is encouraged to vote for his or her political leaders. Half the adults voting for such leaders have no idea what the candidates stand for, or they base their vote on that candidate’s standpoint on one or a few particular issues. Half the senior high school students turning 18 don’t know the definition of a liberal, socialist or nationalist. These 18-year-olds are voting for the future of their country and the state in which they’ll be living, but they have no clear-cut education about what they’re voting for.
Math, reading and natural sciences are what our education is. Politics, history and social sciences are what our education needs.
Our society is built on politics, history and social sciences. Why isn’t our education built on such subjects, too, if education is meant to prepare us for the real world? I’ve come upon many politically and economically brilliant students. These students only have such knowledge because of their interests outside of school. They bother to learn about these subjects outside of school and outside of school alone. These students also get a 2.0 or less GPA. Our government, local, national and global, plays dirty. It sets up certain acts and propositions to sound amazing for certain groups, groups that if persuaded, could easily win the approval of such acts or propositions. These proposals also influence other groups in a roundabout way that economically and socially uneducated people don’t see. Even the groups that would want such plans to be approved don’t see these consequences because they’ve spent their lives educated in math, reading and natural science.
If a certain poor minority group lived in a particular area where there is a lot of violence and crime, the government would want to get them out of that area to clean it up. One way to do this would be to raise taxes. Now, the people in the prissy suburbs would immediately vote "yes" to such a plan because that area might be next to them and they might want less police cars running by at night. But guess what happens? That minority group can’t pay to live in that area, so they move out. Where do they move? Another area, and that area might be next to another prissy suburb that’s going to want to do the exact same thing. So what happens? The government finds the ghetto, kicks the people out, cleans up the area and repeats the process with the area the people move to. What does this do? The people keep moving, and the government keeps trying to fix the areas they move to. There’s a broken bone in that society, and the government’s looking at the scratches.
I’m not incredibly politically, economically or socially educated. I didn’t figure out the potential future of the previously mentioned plan on my own. It took a person with a ghetto education to expose me to something like that. I’m a 4.0 at the top school in my district. She’s a 2.3 at a so-so public school in my district. She’s going to know what she’s doing when she’s given a choice about the society she lives in, not because of her education, but because of what she goes out of her way to learn about. I’m so caught up trying to keep up with the mold of the school system to even take the time to read an article about the propositions in my area.So why don’t I take the extra time to learn about such things? I shouldn’t have to. If education wants to prepare us for the real world, education needs to step it up. “Take action in your society!” they tell us. How can we if we don’t know what we’re fighting for inside out from all points of view? The multiple-choice standardized tests help us get into college. College helps us get a career.
Politics, social science, economics and history help us know why things are the way they are. Through understanding that, we can try and change it.
How do you expect yourself to be educated on one certain societal issue and fight for it if you don’t understand the society itself?
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