Uniformity and Pointlessness

The Arizona public school system. A satire in itself. What happened to the days when the point of school was to be educated to succeed? Most of you reading this paper probably were not alive during that time. The new motto for Arizona’s public school system is “more students, less teachers.” That sure sounds like a recipe for success now, doesn’t it? The biggest problems, though, with the public school system are the guidelines and requirements that they have to use to teach their students.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there is a week by week schedule teachers are supposed to stay on. What is the cause of these regulations? It is standardized testing. Every day of school has the goal of preparing you for the standardized tests but in actuality, those tests don’t prove anything in regards to how successful a student is going to be, they measure one’s intellectual ability in the main subjects: math, English, and science. They test you on things like the five paragraph essay. The first thing in this class we learned was that we have to get away from the traditional high school five paragraph essay.

I believe our school system provided by the government which in turn is actually provided from our tax dollars needs to be restructured. The purpose cannot be to sort out the geniuses from the almost geniuses to the below average students. They need to have the purpose of preparing students for what is to come, and right now they are not doing that. I went to a public school up until the eighth grade. I went from being hated by teachers for speaking my opinion to being embraced for doing so at a Jesuit high school that had no government regulations and where we were not required to take the standardized test to graduate high school.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of jobs that require someone to come in to work and crunch numbers day after day, but what about the people that advance society? Those are the people that think outside of the box. Anything new cannot be a repetition. It takes new ideas and creativity. A school that stays between the lines and shushes kids’ thoughts is doing no one any favors other than creating militaristic lines of uniformed minds.