Flaws in American Education and how they link to Politics

I want to talk about the American education system. It clearly has many flaws, but we have a decent foundation to work with. Right now, schools are set up more like financial institutions than academic ones. Teachers do not make enough money-while students are required to pay an excessive amount of money for the quality of education they receive.

It should be mandatory for students to be taught more extensively on how our country works. Schools do offer classes and have some required courses for history and government, but it isn't good enough. For the most part, I’ve had to research it on my own.

This year, I will be paying taxes and bills that go along with getting older. Even though I took finance 1050 in high school and passed, I still couldn’t tell you how to file my taxes from anything I learned in that class. I only know how because my parents sell financial education, therefore I’ve been taught how to handle money at home. I know enough to say that I felt like finance 1050 taught me wrong. They did not teach velocity banking or tax write offs, which are two strategies that can especially help college students pay off loans. That would be useful information for life. With this said, I did get to generate a more extensive career plan and learn some questionable things about mortgages.

In recent news, many experts have been publicly condemning history classes for not teaching students a diverse and well rounded history of the world. There is clear bias in the curriculum that favors specific ethnicities, races, and religions. Topics such as systemic racism and black history are not taught to students.

With the Black Lives Matter movement and protests happening around the country, more people are trying to educate themselves. Something new I learned was that the 13th amendment to eradicate slavery has an exception. No amendment written to eradicate slavery should have an exception. This gives power to people who work in our government to abuse the loophole in the living text.

More so, relations between America and other nations across the world have been weakening, especially during the pandemic. It is true that students are required to take a second language to graduate high school, but most adults forget the language that they took for a year in their teens. All American students should be taught multiple languages from a young age. Even as early as kindergarten. This would promote more unity within our country between English speakers and non-English speakers. It would also make it easier to travel and communicate with other countries.

The education system affects the politics of the United States, because the students of today are possible politicians of tomorrow. It can also help people understand how social mobility is harder than it seems in America. More importantly, it can teach Americans how to utilize the laws to generate more upward social mobility in their lives.

In many affluent communities I have been in, people will naturally have more conservative views, because the politics match their values. In less affluent communities in Utah, there are still many conservatives, but that seems to be more due to lack of education. I say this because they vote against their own needs. One example of this, is how extended members of my family voted for representatives that were against Obamacare. Now, they do not have access to good healthcare at all. Logically-if they knew that their voting choices had a largely negative impact on their quality of life-they would change the way they voted. The only justifiable reason for their current voting decisions is that they weren’t taught any better. Therefore, education has an extremely strong influence on how people vote, and, in turn, the politicians that get elected.

One thing at least most people can agree on is that our education system needs to be more accessible and improved across all communities in the U.S. This doesn’t mean all Americans should be taught to side with a specific political party. All I’m suggesting is that it is important to educate people on how to take a side that aligns with their values and positively impacts their lives the most.