Personal Opinion: We Need Reformed Education
An opinion piece on Education Reformation and the role it plays in teaching inequality.
I stand and watch as the fabric of my country is being torn.
America is suffering a crisis. Hyper-polarization is tearing the fabric of our democracy; systemic racism and double standards are enabling the division of our people and crippling our nation.
My childhood friends gathered at protests so their voices can be heard. Instead, they were silenced by tear gas and bullets.
My grandmother, an immigrant from Italy, was afraid to go to the store alone because she remembers what a civil war looks like—and she thinks she is seeing another one every time she steps out the door.
I, the lesbian chick next door who has never hesitated to show love, respect, and kindness to everyone, even those who stood to take my right to love away from me, am now not only fighting against the ignorant masses that have never met me, but the very system that taught those masses to hate me and anyone like me—our education system.
We are taught how to hate people who are different than us.
We witness this every day in some form or another:
“Hate the sin, not the sinner.”
“Marriage is sanctioned by God as a holy sanctimony between man and woman.”
“Why would we want gender-neutral bathrooms? I don’t want a man in the same restroom as my daughter.”
For centuries, our education system has been feeding Americans a false history based on hidden agendas and erased cultures. Unfortunately, I strongly believe this to be a deliberate act of systemic racism and homophobia that plays a complex role in the continuance of the “White is Right” ideal our country has been built upon and is desperately trying to hold onto.
George Orwell once said, “the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” Our education system must have an objective set of values in which teaching means to empower people with learning how to think, rather than what to think, thereby enabling a nation of citizens to make wise choices.
A few of these practices, in my humble opinion, include:
- Schools should thoroughly examine the “informal curriculum,” or the governance of their school community and the relationships among those within it. The importance of the governance of the school community and the quality of the relationships among those within it can scarcely be overemphasized. Classrooms and schools should be managed by adults who govern in accord with democratic values and principles and who display traits of character, private and public, worthy of emulation.
- Student participation in the governance of their classrooms and schools should be an integral part of civic education beginning in the earliest grades and extending throughout the span of their formal schooling.Classrooms and schools should be considered laboratories in which students can employ participatory skills commensurate with their maturity. They should learn to interact effectively, as well as learn how to monitor and influence school and public policies. Governance, as used here, means more than seeking or serving in a class or school office. It means having a voice in such matters as school rules and disciplinary procedures. Governance means that each student is a citizen possessed of the rights and charged with the responsibilities that accrue to citizens in a constitutional democracy.
- Every student should become familiar with the nation’s fundamental documents through age-appropriate instruction.These documents would include but are not limited to the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, The Federalist Papers, landmark decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, the constitution of the state in which they reside, and other significant writings and speeches.
- Students at all grade levels can profit from the study of exemplary citizens, both the famous and not-so-famous, those from the past and from the present.The use of a wide variety of age-appropriate historical narratives, biographies, autobiographies, and current accounts in the media should be encouraged. Students, particularly in an age of anti-heroes, should have many opportunities to learn about people who have defended human rights and political freedoms, fulfilled civic responsibilities, or had the courage to make ethical and moral decisions when they were in the minority.
- State and school districts should recognize, reward, and retain teachers who are outstanding civic educators so that they are not lost to the nation’s classrooms.More than 200 studies have found that teachers who have greater training in both their subject matter and in how to teach it well are more effective with students. All too often, however, master teachers move into school administration or other professions where financial or other rewards are greater. Efforts need to be made, therefore, to see that recognition and rewards are sufficient to persuade the best teachers to remain in the classroom.
If we imagine a world in which critical thinking and factual historic and cultural teaching is the main foundation of education, we will realize that a paradigm shift towards positive change is necessary so that we can have well-rounded ideals of objectivity, accountability, and teaching in ways that produce a broad enlightened mature outlook, aka paideia, equally implemented and practiced throughout our school systems.
Racial injustices, gender discrimination, religious condemnations, and the rejection of global warming are just a few issues in which an education system built upon objectivity and critical thinking would make all the difference. What we need from education can be a complex and controversial conversation, but I still think the conversation needs to be had and not ignored, don’t you?
That lesbian chick next door,
Gia
