Education in America

My choice of topic for this paper is a very important one; it is the purpose of education in America. This is one of the most important issues in our country right now. I am going to discuss what I believe should be being taught in our educational institutions and why I believe it is not being done. One major reason I chose this topic is because I am a product of American education and I am one of the lucky people who was intelligent enough to learn beyond what was being provided to me in school, so therefore I was able to prosper in life. So many people seem to look over this problem and that is a huge problem in itself. What I am saying is, if a mother is taught to think the same way that her child is than it would be nearly impossible for her to see a problem with this. This is stated in The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher when author John Taylor Gatto states "No middle-class parents I have met actually believe that their kid's school is one of the bad ones. Not one single parent in twenty-six years of teaching. That's amazing, and probably the best testimony to what happens to families when mother and father have been well-schooled themselves, learning the seven lessons."(177) When he says this, I feel this is an important wake up call for all of America because who is going to recognize the fault in these learning institutions if the parents don't.

Feldmann 2

My idea of what the purpose of education should be is not a difficult concept to understand, it is actually quite simple. I feel that education should be taught to give children the skills and intelligence they need to understand the world and how the world works in order to survive in it. It is important that I stress the word "world" because I feel one of our main problems is that America only likes to make children concerned with their country and no where else. I feel that this is why many children leave high school with such a stubborn and ignorant attitude towards the rest of the world. Michael Moore states in Idiot Nation "A nation that not only churns out illiterate students but hoes out of its way to remain ignorant and stupid is a nation that should not be running the world, at least not until the majority of its citizens can locate Kozovo (or any other country we've bombed) on the map."(154) Michael Moore goes on and on to support my same beliefs about the problems in America's education. I feel that children should be given a requirement in their history classes to have a well in depth understanding of the world surrounding them. I feel that if more children who than become adults understood the true values and cultures of the rest of their world it wouldn't be easy or maybe even possible for their commander in chief to lie to them about why we have decided to bomb them. Education is so important to the survival of this world, and of course country. So many people just go on with their daily routines believing that everything is beautiful and we have this great opportunity of going to school. In so many ways this is true but does that mean that it is a great opportunity. I mean of course learning is something that should always be valued but if you the material

Feldmann 3

you are learning are not the truth or not complete truths does that still have the same value. There is so much taught in school the way the teacher wants to teach it, or what is

put in the text books that is monitored by the government that the teachers must teach. So how can we all really learn truth if our children are learning that Christopher Columbus was a good man and a hero. I mean we have a holiday for this man, how can this be. I find there to be so many problems with this and I don't understand why so many people don't mind that there child is being taught a lie about a murderer.

Of course there are people who disagree with me, for one example the government. How scary would that be for a corrupt "democracy", to have a nation full of intelligent people who really understand the issues being discussed and the wars or attacks on other innocent countries? This would just be too much for the government to handle, because they would be overturned and all of them would be out of jobs. This is why for so many years you are being taught to think the way you do. You are being taught to not really care about anything that you discuss in class, because as soon as class is over you are taught to drop the subject and leave the class so that you are not late to your next class. A teacher of twenty-six years was willing to spill all the truth out about is experience in education in America. "I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do. When the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished neither in my class nor in any class that I know of." (Gatto 175-6) This goes back to the teacher saying "well I would like to go further with this but we don't have the time, and we have other things to cover." Who is

Feldmann 4

the person that decides what really is necessary to be taught, because obviously it not important to care about anything that you might think needs to be changed. To get back

to the subject of disagreement with my argument author Horace Mann wrote in From Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1849 that "the common school, improved and energized as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization."(142) He feels that the operations and reformatory that is provided in schools is very important for civilization and the stability of our country. He also feels that education is a means of removing poverty, and securing abundance. This is the way that he feels and I personally don't agree with him for one major reason. This reason is that they are built as training grounds to shape you the way that the government wants you to be, and even by the way Mann speaks of them you can see how this is done. Mann isn't even aware that he himself is a victim of these schools, and their ability