We Fly Like Paper Get High Like Planes

Dear Followers,


The American educational system has been the topic of debate for many years as cracks in the system have been discovered. The most recent crack comes in the form of global comparison, as hacks from around the globe comment on how the US is failing behind in the race for education. The new leaders in the educational race are India and China as thousands of dazzling statistics from surveys will not cease to support. These surveys in themselves are vastly decontextualized and inconclusive because they are based on distinct measures of intelligence. My problem with these surveys, however, is another problem.


This perception of American educational decline has sparked a plethora of proposals and congressional bills to keep the Americans in the race. One does not have to look far back to remember the No Child Left Behind passed under the Bush Administration. Congressmen and anxious parents have come up with the idea that standardized testing and government subsidies for schools will help a complex problem like education, however these measures only compound the problem. Why? Because they operate within the framework of the educational framework in the first place.

At this point many readers will be dissuaded from continuing onward with this proposal. Any action that works within the established educational framework is acceptable, but any notion of overcoming this framework or even mention of the framework at all are rejected on sport because they are “radical” ideas. Because education has been the framework of learning for hundreds of years, the very way we have come to know the world is through a lens of this educational framework. At the point where education shapes our very epistemology, there is no shock that anything outside of the framework would come as “radical.”


However, I beg the reader to continue. You need not agree with my ideas, and you may in fact have ideas of your own, but you will never get many chances like this one to explore the underlying nature of education and how you and your ideas interact and mesh with the system. In the event that this proposal forces you to evaluate information in a foreign manner then I have succeeded in my ultimate aim. Forcing you to step outside of the system in order to evaluate its assumptions puts you one step closer to overcoming them.


Let me start with an analysis of education. In the US education was developed with the creation of the new republic following the Revolutionary War of 1776. Founded on the Greek ideals of civic duty, the new nation depended on the good will of its citizenry to succeed. Thus, the goal of public education was, and is, to create an educated citizenry for participation in the republic. As the concept of education progressed through the ages, the purpose of the educational system transitioned from this idea of the citizenry to the idea of the individual. Education is now thought of as an “individual” process in which each student has something distinct to take from the educational system for personal use and improvement.


This individualization of education inevitably led to the creation of the grade. In a world where education was no longer for the good of the common people but for the improvement and advancement of the individual, an overarching sense of competition is fostered. The main tool for evaluation is comparison. All measurements are relative, meaning measurements only have relevance when they are juxtaposed. They mean nothing absent this juxtaposition. Thus the new tool for evaluation in education turned outward, forcing teachers to compare every student in order to “measure” achievement.

While this form of measurement may have been inevitable, the institution of the grade was not. The only way to quantify achievement was through the establishment of a uniform measure for all students, allowing teachers to “evaluate” individual progress. Such a tool is only necessary in a world where the primary motive in education is the improvement of the individual. The classic F to A grading system soon became ingrained in American education.


The concept of a grading system is supremely dehumanizing. To reduce the complex entity of the student down into a measurable and subjective single digit is to erase everything that makes up that student. The prioritization of the measure destroys the value of everything that makes us human. Things like character, scholarship, intelligence, actions, and relationships become secondary to what teachers perceive as the only “accurate” measure of achievement. When we reduce complex students, we undermine everything they stand for and are deprived of a real understanding of who they are. This has completely depersonalized education to the point where we believe every student can learn in the same manner.


Modern institutions have only exacerbated this problem. The modern public school, jam packed with thousands of students, has become so unmanageable to a depersonalized approach is the only feasible option. Teachers can no longer give individual focus to students but instead need to group them all together in order to get any learning done at all. Imagine, a teacher at Wayzata High School with four blocks of 30 students each developing an individual study plan for every student!


Secondly, the concept of selective education has served to completely dehumanize the student and to destroy the way every student views themselves. In a world where universities and colleges will only select a limited amount of individuals, the sense of competition is pushed to the extreme. This has led to the introduction of superfluous “measures” of achievement that help colleges quickly understand prospective students. Queue in the standardized test. Regardless of the fact that school curriculums are vastly distinct throughout the nation, policy makers have the notion that bombarding students with an endless amount of random and disjointed factoids will prove that educational systems are working. This will be addressed in a later passage in this proposal.

Moving back, when this sense of competition is pushed to the extreme, students themselves begin to look at the grade as the only measure of their own identity. Students become so stressed out in maintaining the top grade level because to do otherwise would be to underplay who they are as an individual. You have no doubt seen how students will gripe and complain to get every point they can. You have no right to blame students. In a framework where all importance is placed on the grade, the grade takes a metaphysical position of all-importance and thus students have a right to try and protect theirs.


Now you may be asking, what is the alternative to a grade? I will have to agree that while grades are fundamentally wrong, there is no denying that the system is quick and easy. All dehumanizing practices are. The alternative is not a new system to replace the grade but rather a new system to replace the framework of education. Because of the way education is constructed right now, try to change the use of grades would be pointless. Yes, even in education we must first remove the system to bring about real change. Only then can there be space for an alternative that focuses and evaluates each student individually through personalized and contextualized achievement. This way we can measure children by WHAT they do, not HOW they do.


Many will not be sold on this abuse alone. They will reason that the educational advantages of the current educational system would outweigh any risk of dehumanization. This is where they are wrong. As the system continues to advance, we are losing knowledge, not the other way around. Before I go into the reasons for this phenomenon, let me emphasize that when these arguments hold true our only option is to change. In a world of student abuse and a drop in education there is no reason to continue pressing onward with the educational framework.


Many of you may be confused with my claim that the educational system is in fact uneducational. My understanding of this has come through a synthesis of personal experience and research, taking from Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves To Death.” The way that school curriculums are set up in the modern world lend to the accumulation of pointless information. Just as the growth of a television culture has led to the diminishment of relevant information as everything is taken out of context, education is increasingly taking everything out of context to fit the new busy world of information.

Education, as any other institution, is shaped by the media. To the point where the media shapes our understanding of the world, the media shapes our institutions as well. Information in the modern world has taken precedent over understanding. The new emphasis is on the accumulation of information, not the understanding of information. Students and teachers are duped into believing that having more information is the best way to learn.


All in the sake of management, teachers have moved from an interactive and intuitive style of teaching to a redundant and detached style of teaching. This has given birth to the “plug-and-chug” process in which students are loaded with busy work and assignments that allow them to plow through every day with the conception that they are learning. After all, they are doing work.


What these exercises do is build up the arsenal of unrelated facts in the mind of the student. The student does not get an understanding of how these facts work together because this type of detached work rewards those who plow through and not those who step back and analyze information. After all, grades and scores are based on answering the most right, not answering the most best.


The collection of information wouldn’t seem very appealing if the public could easily see through its utility. Thus, we have developed the institution of the test. When information is framed in anticipation of the test, everything is given a “purpose.” This false sense of purpose is enough to assuage the masses into the conception that everything they learn is “useful.” Thus students don’t feel the “chug-and-plug” of the everyday and they continue unaware through school. Relevance and contextual information do not mean anything. They aren’t on the test after all.

We are no longer trained to become ideal citizens, but ideal collections of information. Students, look at your every day classes. With everything that you are learning in school, how much can really be applied to the real world? I am not saying that knowledge is useless, but irrelevant knowledge is useless. Rather, knowledge for the sake of knowledge is useless. School needs to be more focused on application instead of the accumulation of facts.


I will stop there. Everyone needs to rant every now and then.


Come Around Here I Make Them All Day,
Noel