K-12
Educational systems are meant to prepare you for your future and set you up to
be prepared for college and acquiring your future. Schools are supposed to
teach you how to mentally prepare and study time management for your classes so
you can comprehend what you are actually learning, teach you how to use your
time properly, train you to do well in life. Most schools don’t teach us these
things now days, half of the time the things we are learning we never even use
when we get into the real big time work world. We aren’t taught to think critically and
independently, we are pushed along the line of the educational system and fed
information that we seemingly forget immediately after being fed this
information. I feel that public schools now days are there mainly for the
social aspects and they teach you more to be social with your peers, they are
ruling out the humanities proportion of educational learning and leaning more
towards the math and sciences. Degrees that were once accepted to get into
health care such as a Masters degree to become a Physical Therapist now
requires you to have your Doctorate degree in order to become a Physical
Therapist, it’s crazy how things work out like that. I feel that is a great way
to do it but in order to accomplish such things you have to be well educated
from the start which all revolves around K-12 systems, children need more of a
challenge. The government has mandated standards that puts teachers in kind of
a bind in that they have such set standards for schooling that it disables our
children to think out of the box, because teachers have to teach to such set
standards it limits the creativity and ability to think out of the box for
students.
John
Gatto has made some amazing points when he states that, “School trains children
to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers.
School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically
and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help
your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to
take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in
history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, and theology - all the
stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty
of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner
dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they
seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and
through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your
children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.”- John Gatto "Against
school: How Public Education Cripples our Kids, and Why" Students do need to be taught to be leaders
and adventurers as well as thinking critically and independently, that’s why
college is so great for students now days, the teachers don’t care if you show
up to class- you need to grow up and show up in order to maintain your
education, they don’t take roster because they don’t care if you show up or
not, it only reflects badly on your part, not theirs. They are there to teach
and you need to be there in order to learn. College gets you to figure out your
own study patterns and think critically as well as figuring out your time
management in order to do well in the class and in life, the material isn’t
bottle fed to you by the teachers you actually need to read the material to do
well. I feel as if k-12 education needs to be the same way. In order to succeed
you must do the work. He also states that, “We must wake up
to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds,
drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.
Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to
turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not
even for a day."- John Gatto "Against school: How Public Education
Cripples our Kids, and Why"
Teachers can’t really teach their students to think out of the
box, they have to teach more along the lines that need to be met in terms of
standardized testing. Paulo Freire states in his Banking Concept of Education article that, "Education thus
becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and
the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues
communiqués and makes deposits, which the students patiently receive, memorize,
and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope
of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and
storing the deposits.” Most all of the
authors read for this paper have a similar concept for public educational
systems now days. bell hooks, another author of a critical thinking article
writes, “By the time most students enter college classrooms, they
have come to dread thinking. Those students who do not dread thinking often
come to classes assuming that thinking will not be necessary, that all they
will need to do is consume information and regurgitate it at the appropriate
moments. In traditional higher education settings, students find themselves yet
again in a world where independent thinking is not encouraged. Fortunately,
there are some classrooms in which individual professors aim to educate as the
practice of freedom. In these settings, thinking,, and most especially critical
thinking, is what matters.”- bell hooks Teaching
Critical Thinking; Practical Wisdom
Now that I think of it, the only class that I ever had that
required us to think critically was creative writing, in college you see a lot
more of critical thinking but we are mainly discussing k-12 education. Students
in this era turn down the critical thinking process and are more comfortable
with passive learning where they don’t have to worry about thinking critically,
they don’t want to be involved in classroom participation or to engage in
classroom activities. They mainly just want to get in, and get out. We have
been taught to sit and listen to the teacher and never to question anything for
fear of being wrong. “Keeping an open mind is an essential requirement of
critical thinking. The most exciting aspect of critical thinking in the
classroom is that it calls for initiative from everyone, actively inviting all
students to think passionately and to share ideas in a passionate, open manner.
When everyone in the classroom, teacher and students, recognizes that they are
responsible for creating a learning community together, learning is at its most
meaningful and useful. In such a community of learning there is no failure.
Everyone is participating and sharing whatever resource is needed at a given moment
in time to ensure that we leave the classroom knowing that critical thinking
empowers us.”-bell hooks Teaching Critical Thinking; Practical Wisdom
