Final Paper.

K-12 Educational systems are meant to prepare students, to set them up to be prepared for college and acquiring a future. Schools are also supposed to teach students how to mentally prepare and study for tests as well as teach them time management for their classes so they can learn to comprehend what they are actually learning and enjoy it. Schools need to teach students how to use their time properly, train them to be successful in life. Students aren’t taught to think critically and independently, instead they are pushed along the line of the educational system and fed information that they seemingly forget immediately after being fed such information in class. Public schools are social frenzies to simply put it; they mainly help the students with simple socializing skills, learning to be social with peers. The unfortunate part about the education world now days is that they are ruling out the humanities proportion of educational learning and leaning more towards the math and sciences. Children need more of a challenge. The government has mandated standards that puts teachers in a kind of bind that they have such set standards for their teaching, 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 the students, whose futures are at risk.

Schools recently are concerned about keeping the students in class and meeting the minimum requirements of the educational standards, it definitely doesn’t help when the students don’t have the drive to even get out of bed and go to school for the day. With nothing to interest them, especially if they don’t want to be there to begin with it’s hard for the teachers to grasp their attention in the classroom and to get them to actually do the work, students have the attitude that they don’t need this stuff in the real world, so why learn it? John Gatto writes about public schools and how it cripples our children states that we need to, “Wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds... Mandatory education serves children only incidentally "(Gatto) Students in the k-12 courses don’t feel the need to be there and are constantly bored. They don’t get taught to think critically and independently, they get lectured more on attendance of the student body, and meeting the minimum requirements through the state than actually being taught important information. Which results in students becoming less involved in their education. Schools put so much pressure on the students that it pushes them away, if the teacher is distracting them from the actual purpose of the class being taught and only focusing on disciplining the students for not showing up, it results in a negative manor.

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 the standardized testing. Which is really unfortunate because students don’t want to be taught to test, they want to learn interesting stuff, they don’t want to be pressured into taking tests that determine if you will graduate high school or not because what do you learn in high school, that you don’t learn in college all over again? It’s like you’re starting from the beginning all over again. 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.”(Freire)  Receive, memorize, and repeat. That is what the students are doing in public school systems. That is what they have to look forward to from 9-12^th grades. Students want to learn interesting stuff that motivates them to go to college and be successful in life. The rough thing about that system of banking is that once students’ memorize and repeat the information, only the information that you are truly interested in, sticks- all the other information that they spent so long memorizing, just leaves their brains and vanishes like they never even learned anything.

Students get so fed up with high school and they way that everything works in that whole system that it impairs their views of going to college, they hear it is harder and won’t be as easy, they expect to have the same study patters and discipline not knowing that college is where all the magic happens bell hooks, another author of a critical thinking article and social activist 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.”(hooks) bell writes in great detail about how the more valued classes are not essential to educational systems and how math and English take precedence over humanities classes which makes the more challenging, enthusing classes like humanities courses weaved out of the system, because science and math and technologies are more of the future and humanities classes don’t prepare you as well.

 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. Teachers are so set into teaching along these standardized tests that they forget the meaning of school which is to teach students to think critically and independently, these teachers are all in drill mode to “teach to the test” that it narrows the curriculum for all students needing to learn important stuff. Standardized testing even if It has been done since the 1800’s has ruined education for this era it has declined vastly within the years due to the strict standards of the government. Mike Rose writes in his article Resolutions on Education, “To stop making the standardized test score the gold-standard of student achievement and teacher effectiveness. In what other profession do we use a single metric to judge goodness? Imagine judging competence of a cardiologist by the average of her patients’ cardiograms. “(Rose) basically stating that teachers reputations and their ability to teach shouldn’t be based on the test scores of the students but their knowledge of what they are teaching and how successful the class is as a whole when the year is over.

A school empathy day would be a great idea to include in schooling where all the students practice their empathy by perhaps moving around the lunch room to break up the social cliques and practice their empathy skills conversing with other students, Barry Boyce writes in an article about “A Real Education”, “the Program on Empathy Awareness and Compassion in Education (PEACE), which focuses on ways to promote pro-social behavior.. The teacher training program that Jennings directs as part of the initiative recently received a second major grant from the U.S. Department of Education to study the effects of mindfulness and related practices with classroom teachers”(Boyce) learning mindfulness in schools is a very important part of a students life, they need to learn mindfulness in order to be successful with other people in terms of whether or not you have meetings with a social group of peers or coworkers, but definitely when you make it to college.

Putting everything into perspective, students need more of a challenge, they need to be able to think critically and independently. And with the standardized teaching it makes it very hard for the teachers to practice any other kind of teaching that allows the students to be able to think outside the box. Mindfulness and empathy need to be taught. Students are unmotivated to move on after high school. Changes need to be made in order for students to succeed now days or the educational results will only keep declining year after year. By making these changes it wouldn’t necessarily change every problem that pertains to the school systems, yet it would get us a few steps into making a positive change on students attitudes towards learning proper information for their futures.

Works cited

Gatto, John. "Against School - John Taylor Gatto." Against School - John Taylor Gatto. Wes Jones, Sept. 2003. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.

Freire, Paulo. "Philosophy of Education -- Chapter 2: Pedagogy of the Oppressed." Philosophy of Education -- Chapter 2: Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum Books, 1993, n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Hooks, Bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York [etc.: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Rose, Mike. "Resolutions Someone Should Make for 2011." The Answer Sheet -. WASHINGTON POST, 5 Jan. 2011. Web. 10 Dec. 2013

Boyce, Barry. "About a Poem: GenineLentine on Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart”." Shambhala Sun. The Mindful Society, May 2012. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.