Aristotle once said, "The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet." I am afraid that if Aristotle tasted today’s educational fruit, he would gag at the tart taste. The education system in the United States today is far from perfect, and, in some people’s opinion, far from good. I recently read an article which said that today’s college degree is comparable to an eleven-year high school diploma in the 1930’s and ‘40’s. What has caused this rapid decay in the education of America’s youth? In my opinion, it is just a few things that have caused it, yet they have had a colossal affect on the education system.

Once, when I was listening to a comic doing stand-up on television, he said, "Have you ever noticed teachers in college are called professors? That’s because they don’t actually teach you anything. They just profess all this nonsense to you." If you think about it, it’s true. They don’t necessarily just preach meaningless nonsense to you, but they don’t always seem to make you want to care. From a college professor’s point of view, it is understandable. To try and make every topic studied relevant to every student would be virtually impossible. I believe the problem is, though, that this mindset has spread to high school and even junior high and elementary school teachers. Those are the years when, you have to make the student care about what he or she is doing. In the elementary school years, the basis for the rest of his/her life’s education is being set. The question of Do I really care about this work? is being asked and answered in the student’s head. In junior high and high school, the teacher has to get the student’s mind off daydreams of the opposite sex and onto his/her work. These are the years where the student decides what will be more important, grades or girls. I don’t believe teachers are doing a very good job of getting the importance of an education across. I believe many of them are either going about it the wrong way or just not doing it at all. I think that many teachers in today’s schools have the "I’m just preparing you for college" attitude, so they can get out of actually teaching and just give a brief lecture and assign work. Easy for them, right? The problems occur when students actually get to college and are not prepared because they did not have a good basis set down for them in certain subjects.

Some teachers also think that long, time-consuming "busywork" is the way to get through to a student’s mind. While sometimes this repetition of the same material does help a student learn, it still does not explore the broad spectrum of information that could be attained if the class did creative, mind-stimulating projects. In a world history class while studying the life and rule of Julius Caesar, the teacher could assign groups to do a video project over the life of Caesar. This oftentimes is the case in honors and gifted programs. The teacher decides what they think is important and that is all the students do. Even though it is supposed to be "higher learning," the class often does not do projects and other such things that make the "gifted" students use the right (creative) half of their brain as well as their left (analytical) half.

Another thing is that the schools cater to the needs of the low-level students. In Texas, we have what is called the TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) test. For one, high-level, "gifted" students shouldn’t be subjected to the monotonous skill drills and assessment tests that are used to prepare students for the test. While some practice is needed, the extent to which it is taught goes far beyond a sensible stopping point. Many schools also teach to tests such as the TAAS test. Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the test, which is to test previously learned skills? By taking previous TAAS tests as assessments and having learning timelines based on the test is just teaching to the test and therefore defeats its purpose.

An education is something that everyone should value as if every time you learned something new, you got paid one hundred dollars. The sad thing, though, is that education is near the bottom of the list when talking about many people’s most prized possessions. Robert Lindner once said, "Our schools have become vast factories for the manufacture of robots. We no longer send our young to them primarily to be taught and given the tools of thought, no longer primarily to be informed and acquire knowledge; but to be ‘socialized.’" If we don’t start fixing our schools and the education system in general, knowledge might soon be cut out of the curriculum, and school might become known as a social function rather than a place of learning.