Standing Up to School

Summer is coming to an end rapidly and school season is almost upon us, which means back to late nights of staying up trying to complete assignments. While doing my homework over the summer, I started wondering why school is set up the way it is today. What led us to have 5-day a week schedule with homework about 90% of the nights that students have to stay up and try to finish. Why would overloading us with work while having to be up early the next day be the smartest way to learn? This system has been the same for over a hundred years, when will it be time for a change?

Curious, I started to research why the school system is organized in the fashion it is today and wondered if this was the most productive way or not. The facts I found were eye opening, schools were created in order to train kids how to work in factories, thats why we sit in rows of chairs and only get small break to eat then go back to an eight hour day. After almost 150 years the classroom has not changed at all, it continues to teach the same way to all the students, even if their needs are different. No student is like another, we are different in one way or another, so why would we all try to learn something the same way if our brains are structured completely different. One size does not fit all for learning, but yet we continue to treat it that way after many have failed. 

Also, teachers have one of the most important jobs, without them our society would be full of uneducated people. They shape our leaders into what they are, a good teacher is able to change the course of a students life but yet we continue to underpay them. They do not have much say in what they teach either, instead the school board makes the decision on what to lecture and test on, but yet some have never taught in their life so how would they know what the students actually need to know? We most definitely need to make new adjustments in order to help the students to find what their passion is. Other countries such as Finland has already made reforms to education by reducing school days and making homework very limited, but yet they have some of the smartest students in the world. Everything in our culture today has been adapted for the new and better, its time we start doing the same with our education.