The modern American school system is stupid. We cram hundreds of kids all in the same age groups with only one overworked adult to supervise them and wonder why they act like crazed chickens. How, exactly, do little kids learn good social skills from other little kids? They don’t. They learn to form cliques and to pick on weaker kids – exactly like an over crowded chicken coop.
That’s not mere analogy – the similarities are striking and scary.
Growing up spending the vast majority of your people time with people your own age is artificial as all get out – this NEVER happens organically. Kids raised eighty years ago would expect to spend a lot of their time with older siblings and their friends, parents, relatives and within the community and church with people of a variety of ages. Kids were taught basic manners and learned by doing how to talk to or listen to older people. As a result, their vocabularies were far larger than those of modern kids.
They also spent less time talking like young children. I don’t mean the chattering little kids use – I mean the inability to form good sentences and to follow a logical thread while relating information. Things that usually disappeared by middle school we now see in high school. The internet doesn’t seem to help – modern kids and young adults ramble through most of their discussions. While misusing a number of the words they do know, I might add.
The system is designed for the average – only it’s next to impossible to have thirty average kids all in the same class. We get a spectrum that the teachers and curriculum are not ready to deal with. Little Johnny is a wiz; Little Jane has trouble with math. Never mind, just give Jane her D and keep right on going. Johnny is so bored he’s no longer trying so give him his F and keep as many as you can between A and C.
This serves none of the kids. The ones in the middle aren’t challenged. The ones falling behind eventually find the gulf insurmountable. The ones racing ahead spend hours in mind numbing boredom as concepts they already get are explained again and again. Golly wonder why this doesn’t work?
Industrializing education is a failure. Yeah, if gets most of them out with basic abilities – but that’s NOT what education is for. Parents know this full well across the socio-economic spectrum. Poor parents will literally line up for miles to get their kids a chance at a charter school and a better education. That wouldn’t happen if the system worked.
Then there’s the inevitable bullying. I was that kid – the one always picked on. I remember hearing about Columbine for the first time and the very first thing that crossed my mind was to wonder why it had taken so long for something like that to happen. I had good parents, a growing faith, a somewhat supportive family – nothing’s perfect – and in the Seventies, there were still heroes to look up to on cartoons, in movies and on TV. That was gone by the Nineties so even good parents are in an uphill battle with the the rage and pain and embitterment of a bullied child.
No, the kids acting out ARE NOT justified. That the schools turned a blind eye and the judicial system is incapable of stepping in without over doing it is OUR faults, but that DOES NOT give license to take your fury and pain out on your classmates.
That said, it’s past time we fixed this broken system that is literally creating little psychopaths both from the bullies and the bullied. School should not be an overcrowded freak show. It’s a place to learn and grow – to draw out what’s best in our little ones.
We don’t need a warehouse for kids. We need community level schools. Every kid can have the best teacher for a given subject with the touch of a button. We no longer need over worked, underpaid, ineffective prison guards. We need real teachers with classes sized best for the kids. We don’t need two hundred kids under one roof – cameras can provide parental supervision of the classrooms.
What we need is a real school where kids are safe and teachers can stop the children from becoming vicious chickens.
Now.
