What happened to education?

When I was in elementary school, we had our normal courses you know, Math, Science, English, Social Studies, etc. We were also very fortunate to have P.E. with an actual P.E. teacher, and we also had Dance class. In Jr. High besides the already mentioned classes we also had Band, Choir, Typing, ASB, AVID, Spanish and even time for accelerated reading. By the time I was in high school we had all the choices previously mentioned and we also had French, Art, Creative Writing, Drama, Welding, Auto Tech, Woodworking, and Home Economics.

We had such a plethora of classes that there was a way for practically every student to find success. Everything I mentioned happened during the normal school day, of course we had other things available after schools, such as cheerleading, drill and shields, martial arts, and plenty of clubs, such as chess club, robotics, etc. What I am trying to say is that schools offered a very complete educational program whether it'd be during the day or afterschool. I learned how to fix a lawnmower thanks to auto tech, I learned to love writing thanks to Creative Writing, my friend Raul and his father make furniture thanks to his Woodworking class. I am bilingual Enligh and Spanish, and I also participated in Drama and Dance class. As you can see we had many choices to find something we were good at or enjoyed, not only that but the skills learned in those classes have helped me be more succesful in life as well as helping me be a better teacher, a critical thinker, and it led me to study two degrees as well as learning a lot of other useful skills for everyday life. By the time I was in Jr. High I could mostly cook for myself, and by the time I was in High School I could cook for the entire family.

How many of our current students can say that today? How many schools still teach these things? Are we really preparing our students for the real world? Why do we tell them if they expect to be succesful in life they need to go to college and university or else they'll never find a good job or one that pays well? My father is a welder, he went to trade school and he makes a lot more money than I do. My brother has a high school education, he never really liked school, but he learned a trade and he does pretty well for himself as well. I enjoyed school which is why I have a career but when I see my students now and what we're teaching them and the way my teachers and the schools I went to taught me, I can see a gap in education the size of the Grand Canyon. Schools today are focused on two things, Math and English, and believe me other classes are even cancelled when state testing is coming up so students can have extra English and Math classes. I do not teach these subjects so there comes a time where I am only acting as support for the English and Math teachers. Where did education go wrong? Why have we allowed this to happen? As an experiment I decided to ask my students how many of them could cook for themselves? About 2% answered that they could. I asked them if there was anything they would like to learn about in school and I was pleasantly surprised that many of them wanted to learn things such as carpentry, typing, coding, robotics, other languages, cooking, and even how to do other useful things such as changing a tire.

I often ask my students questions and teach them that even wrong answers teach us something, but we learn nothing from giving no answers. After all we are at school to learn, are we not? Throughout my time in school I saw many hands raised when teachers would ask something, and when a student would make a mistake teachers would often thank them for trying and then corrected the the mistake and we all learned from it. It seems that nowadays students have two answers "silence" or "I don't know" and they are quick to give that answer as they've been taught that those answers will help the class move along. This being one of the greatest mistakes of my time, I remember the days my mother would drill into me the importance of trying, because trying often led to success. Math and English will not make our students successful, they are basic skills that are needed to function yes, but we've turned them into the end-all be-all of learning.

Classes such as band, drama, woodwork, and home econ have been deemed expensive or unneeded for success, but a lot of my successful friends did not choose careers in education, or those that involved the heavy use of math or science or history. I have friends that make furniture, they weld ships, they are chefs, they are part of a dance company or a theatre group, and yes I have those who are educators, doctors, police officers and the like, but many of them learned a trade or skill in school that has been with them now their entire life and has helped them make a living. Schools taught us real skills that gave us a chance in the real world.

Today we are teaching students how to blindly follow instructions down to the letter, how to supersize your order, that if they don't go to college they'll never find jobs or be able to afford a home, we are teaching them that only Math and English are important, that classes that taught them useful skills for everyday life are too expensive to teach and that companies don't need or want that from their employees anyway, they need drones who are told what to do and to perform that action continuously for their entire shift. Three of my uncles started their own companies without ever going to university, two of them in construction one of them in carpentry. They went to a trade school and yes they did use Math and English, but it wasn't all that they learned in school.

Where did we go wrong then? Well, it is my opinion that we went wrong when we determined that students no longer needed real life skills, we went wrong the moment we started teaching children what to think as opposed to how to think, we went wrong when schools started teaching students to memorize information as opposed to processing information. What does this mean, well most of all carry these neat devices in our person that have practically all the information in the world. We don't need to memorize when we can just ask Siri, or Alex or Google to give us the answer we seek, but as I tell my students, there is a huge difference between knowing the answer and understading the answer. As an example I asked them to teach me how to cook an egg, most knew the basics about how you crack it and then put it in a pan with oil until its ready. Some knew this information because they've done it at home, others had to look it up online, they could recite this information, then I asked them to get the help of their parents to cook one at home just with the instructions they recited, most of them were unsuccessful and it wasn't suprising because all they did was memorize what they were taught, but they really didn't know how to put it into practice, they were taught the theory not the skill, and that is where we went completely wrong, we traded real skills for theory, we traded hands on experience for the automation of the thoughts or our students.

What do I mean by this? Let me give you an example, last school year my friend and I were discussing our students and how our classes were going, she is an English teacher. I remember her telling me that she was teaching her students the Past Perfect Continuous Tense, which is when you write something using the words had been and then add a verb with ing at the end, this means you would write something like "had been running". This is a very basic explanation of the concept, but I digress, she was telling me about this and then she said "A student suddenly asked me how this would be useful in real life?" She paused when she saw the puzzled look on my face, she knew I loved writing, but she also knew that even I was wondering what her answer was. She told the student that these were the rules of writing and that it was important to learn them, but the truth is she herself didn't know how to properly answer that question, and neither did I. You might say, well there's a lot of things we learn that will not apply to our lives or our career, and yes I would have to agree, but if I learn how to sew a button, how to cook an egg, how to build a bookshelf, how to weld a fence, how to play a sport, or even how to dance, there are greater chances that those skills transfer to real life at some point, if we teach our students to pursue those things and be curious about them it may lead them to greater things, but if we instead teach them something as obscure as knowing that when you use the words "had been along with a verb that ends in -ing" it's called the past perfect continuous tense and tell them that is all they will need to succeed in college and in life, then education has failed.

We've eliminated curiosity, critical thinking, creativity and replaced all these things with the memorization of terms, with false promises of a great job and a great life if they would just learn English and Math and do well on their standardized tests. In school my best teachers taught me that hard work, perseverance and following my dreams would help me find happiness, they never assured me it would happen, but they did make a point to prepare me to pursue education in a way that was fulfilling. There was opportunity to learn many different and useful skills in school, there was a chance to explore many different options and even if you didn't choose one of the ones offered you learned valuable skills that make life easier. Today students are denied these opportunities, today they are taught to conform, they are told only college can lead to a real career and we neglect to tell them about other opportunities such as trade school or even entrepreneurship. Education failed our students the moment we decided we knew what was best for them, the moment we decided that they didn't need to dream, they only need a college degree to be happy. Education failed when we told our teachers to teach students to pass a test instead of helping our students grow academically.