Imagining America
A Dialog on Education
America faces a number of challenges today, larger in number and scope than at any time in recent memory. Not the least of these problems are our primary and secondary educational systems, which today lag behind the rest of the industrialized world in a number of substantive ways, especially relative to their ability to instill in students the curiosity to solve problems, and a desire to think creatively. There are a number of obstacles that stand in the way of bettering our primary (and especially our secondary) educational systems, all of which must be understood and reconciled before we are able to bring about the needed changes. To better frame this discussion, we must first understand how we arrived at our current place.
The current primary educational system has its beginnings in the Industrial Revolution around the mid-19th century, and its factory ethos is still quite prevalent. At the time, it was intended to mollify (calm) the rural kids into a life of industrial work for low pay. It seems a bit quaint in this day and age that many of the current fixtures of schools - for example the bells tolling, signaling for students to go to their next class - are throwbacks to the factory life students were being molded for at the time. The United States was the world's largest manufacturer until recently, but China has surpassed us. At the time, only one in twenty students would go on to enroll in college; now, more than half do. Our modern educational system needs to reflect that, as well as numerous other changes in the world we live in today.
As we transition more towards a service-based economy, having a populace which aspires to greater educational attainment becomes increasingly important from an economic standpoint. However, the majority of our current system as is has its basis in a system designed for a vastly different world facing different challenges than that which we live in today.