I am writing this blog because there is a big problem with education in the US. The US public education system was created to educate people so that they would be qualified for entry level jobs in skilled labor professions. It was (and still is) called "primary education" because it was intended to be all the education strictly needed to get a job that paid enough to make a living. When it was originally created, the US public education system served it purpose fairly well. Just teaching students to read and do basic math was enough to qualify them for any number of entry level skilled labor jobs. Now though, this is not the case. High school graduates in the US often have a difficult time even getting a job at McDonald's or WalMart, which are not skilled labor jobs.
There are many reasons for this. Not all of them are entirely the fault of our education system. The amount of education required for entry level skill labor jobs has increased. It has been over 200 years since the inception of the US education system and really the only major change has been scale. Little useful education research has taken place. Admittedly, until recently, research on the scale required has been impossible, but with the instant communication and wide spread use of the internet, this is no longer the case. Some may think that the knowledge required for entry level skilled labor jobs is impossible to learn in the 12 years of primary education that the US public education system provides. This is not true.
The first problem here is that we really don't know significantly more about education than we did 200 years ago when this started. Large amounts of research has been conducted, but with entirely inconclusive results. The primary issue is that until the last decade, we did not have the communication, record keeping, and analytical abilities to handle large samples of students (something that computers and the internet have fixed). The result is that all research has been done on samples too small to yield results that are accurately representative of the entire US population. In application, this has resulted in many schools using different teaching techniques based on the opinions of the teachers, not on scientific research. An example is teaching reading. Many schools in the US teach reading by teaching phonetics (how various letters are pronounced in particular situations). This allows people to easily pronounce words that they are unfamiliar with, however, many English words follow the rules very poorly, so students that do not learn all the exceptions to phonetic rules may mispronounce unfamiliar words until they are corrected. Many other schools in the US teach reading by wrote memorization (memorizing entire words, but not the pronunciation of individual characters). This circumvents the problems with phonetics, but introduces more problems that are worse. If a student is not familiar with a word, they will be entirely unable to pronounce it.
I once helped a kindergarten class in Utah as a service project. The particular school used the wrote memorization method (we discovered this as we were working with the students). A friend and I were helping a group of five or six children learning to read. Most of the children were having a very difficult time reading the three and four letter words generally used in a kindergarten reading curriculum. My friend helped one student with words that were difficult for a while, but quickly realized that the student did not even know how to pronounce the individual letters. He spent ten minutes teaching the students in our group how to pronounce the common consonants and a few of the vowels. After that, all of the students in the group had a much easier time reading the words. He demonstrated how to "sound out" an unfamiliar word and this further helped the students. In the one hour that we were there, the reading ability of all the students in our group improved dramatically.
Not all students learn best with phonetics, but what little research has been done has indicated that more students learn better with phonetics than with memorization. Programs like Hooked on Phonics have provided more strong evidence that most students learn better with phonetics, though to my knowledge this is considered business data, not viable research. Still, many schools in the US religiously use only the memorization method. This decision is generally made by individual teachers or the administration of each school and are based entirely on opinion, not on verified scientific facts.
The first problem with the US education system is the lack of basis on scientific research. Our schools teach based on popular opinion of what techniques work. When there is conflicting research, educators pick the one that they like best. Even when there is strong evidence for one method over another, it is easy for educators to ignore anything they don't agree with because the small sample sizes of research make any results questionable. Colleges teach what techniques they think work best, with little or no evidence for the effectiveness of those techniques. Now that we have the means, we need to start conducting whole scale educational research and start requiring that the US public education system to use that information to improve.
The second problem is that technology and civilization have advanced and our education system has, for the most part, not. We are working with teaching technology that was originally created for classrooms of 10 to 15 students, not necessarily all in the same grade, with very small educational needs (in comparison). We are trying to teach 200 years of US history in the same time that we taught 100 years of US history 100 years ago. We are trying to teach 20 to 30 students per teacher, using the same techniques we used to teach 10 to 15, and in the same amount of time. In short, our educational system is very well equipped for educating students 100 to 200 years ago, but is very poorly prepared for educating students now.
One thing that can help fix this is research. If we can find techniques that will help students learn faster, then the larger amount of things they need to learn will not be such s hurdle. This will not solve the problem though. We will still be teaching students a bunch of stuff that will not help them get a decent job when they get out of high school. We need to evaluate the usefulness of the graduation requirements. Math is important in any job, but many jobs do not need any math beyond basic algebra. Requiring four math classes over four years (8 semesters) of high school is overkill for anyone not going into a technical profession. Instead of having an abstract requirement of four credits of math, a few specific classes should be required (advanced classes should still be provided, for those who want or need them). English has a similar problem, we require a bunch of English credits, when most jobs require little or no English skill. I agree that basic writing and reading should be covered, but that can be done in two classes. History classes should cover less dates and more time lines. They should also stick to things that are directly applicable to modern times and put much less value on things that are not. Instead of memorizing dates, students should be expected to have a reasonable idea of the chronological order of events. Admittedly, some time should be spent on general major events even if they do not directly apply to modern times, but requiring more than two classes on this is absurd. Most required subjects are like this; a small amount of each subject should taught, but only people planning on majoring in those subjects (or related subject) should need to take more.
I can see a lot of people disagreeing with this. It does seem a little extreme. This is because nearly everyone in the US grew up in the US public education system and many do not realize how poorly they were educated. Teachers might disagree with this because if it is true, it means that they are doing a very poor job. I don't blame most teachers for this. A poorly educated teacher is going to be a poor educator unless they change something. It is not their fault that the current education system is not capable of doing a good job. Yes, there are some teachers that are to blame, for resisting positive changes, but I do not think most teachers fall into this category.
I can also see a lot of people asking what should be done with all the extra time freed up if graduation requirements are reduced to the degree that I have suggested (though I feel the answer should be obvious). High schools should provide more classes that teach skills that will qualify students for entry level skilled labor jobs. Metal shop classes are nice, but are extremely general in nature. High schools should provide classes for teaching at least basic welding, which include all types of welding (metal shop generally only covers spot welding, which is barely even welding at all). Many high schools already provide basic computer programming and electrical engineering classes. They could add data structure classes for programmers and electronic logic classes for electrical engineers (equipment would include a computer lab, which they already have, and electrical simulation software, of which there are several quality applications that are free). Classes on basic accounting and bookkeeping would be very useful. In short, this extra time should be used for classes that will allow students to become educated in subjects that will qualify them for good jobs when they graduate. If nothing else, they will at least give students the ability to try things so they will know what they want when they start college (many students waste their first year or so of college taking random classes to decide what they want to do; high school would be a much better time for this).
Many people would probably argue that high school is not enough time to learn enough of a skilled trade to get a job. This is completely and entirely false. I started programming computers when I was 12 years old, in my spare time. (Note that computer programming is considered difficult enough to learn that the CS department at my college does not allow CS majors to have a minor.) When I graduated, I was skilled enough at programming to work any entry level programming job and many more advanced ones. The only problem I had was lack of any paperwork stating this fact. In the ten years since then, I have learned enough about electronics that a friend of mine (who was majoring in electrical engineering at the tine) told me that I was more advanced than second year students at his school (I have also learned enough more programming that there are things I know that a certain PhD in CS is not familiar with). Again, lacking certification, I am unable to get a job in this field. In the last year, I have taken two programming classes, getting very good grades in both (and learning very little) as well as two electronics classes, in which I also got very good grades (I did learn some new stuff in the second one). You might say that this is because I am gifted, which is very likely true (I was in the gifted programs when I attended public school), but I believe a majority of it was that I found a subject that I liked and was able to find resources for learning about it. Most students in the US public education system are not given an opportunity to find a subject they like and even those that do are not generally given the opportunity (or resources) to spend enough time on that subject to become good at it. The result is that students graduate hating work, because most of the work they were forced to do was not interesting to them, and they end up in college without having any idea why they are there. Two hundred years ago, most people knew what they wanted to do with their lives when they were twelve years old. Now, many college students have no idea what they want to do even after twelve years of primary "education" and a year of college. Our public education system is a travesty.
There are many other ways that we could improve our education system. The freeness of knowledge with the internet has almost made the formalness of our current education system entirely obsolete. I mentioned above that I have spent the last ten years learning electrical engineering on my own. All of the knowledge I have gained came from various resources on the internet. When I need information for some experiment, I use Google and Wikipedia. So much information that people twenty years ago had to memorize, I have at my fingertips. This is part of the reason that it is possible to learn useful skills during the course of high school, even though the time is limited. I have regularly used Wikipedia as a resource for finding properties of various chemicals. Twenty years ago, chemists had to memorize properties of common chemicals and refer to text books for uncommon ones. I don't even have to know the properties of the common chemicals to experiment with them, because I can just look them up. Learning chemistry can now be reduced to understanding reactions and knowing what properties specific chemicals have, because there are many free databases that can easily be found on the internet (Wikipedia being the least of these). We no longer need to spend eight hours a day in classrooms to learn and many colleges are starting to offer online courses, but these still follow the strict structure that makes school so difficult for those that don't learn as quickly as some of us.
The intent of this blog is to discuss different things that should be considered for improving education. I cannot promise that any suggestion I make will be better or worse than what we are doing now. I will try to avoid bad ideas, but the point here is to give new ideas that should be researched. I will begin with ideas that already have displayed a lot of promise, I will discuss what little educational research exists that is conclusive, and I will suggest some of the most promising things that are currently being tried. I hope that this will help our educators to improve our broken system.
Lord Rybec
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