I love learning. I aspire to know at least a little about a lot. While I have not been failed by the American school system, I would not say that it has been the most efficient way to spend the past thirteen years. This is why education reform is important. We put our children through a mandatory decade of educational endeavors, yet all they’re getting is a one size fits all education. I think the best representation of this epidemic I have seen is the cartoon of a giraffe, a fish, a monkey, and an elephant, all being tested on their ability to climb a tree.

With different sets of strengths and weaknesses, how can a group of individuals be expected to be capable of the same things? Also, the reptilian part of the brain shuts down when we are threatened and causes problems in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of learning. We see tests and punishments as threats, yet we are then expected to perform well on them. That’s not conducive to anything. If school simply shed light on what students need to work on rather than earning them bad marks, our shortcomings would no longer affect future ambitions such as college acceptances or cause psychological distress. Diagnostic tests instead would save time by being able to focus on skills the student is having trouble with rather than following a curriculum set by a person who doesn’t even know the child’s name.

With the development of such advanced technologies in this day in age, I see no excuse for our educational system to still be fundamentally the same as decades ago. An example of how technology can positively effect the learning world is through Sal Khan. He is the creator of Khan Academy, the “one world schoolhouse.” On the website there is free access to thousands of videos that Khan creates instructing how to do anything from addition and subtraction to JavaScript. Khan envisions a re-imagined education where teachers no longer direct but guide the students on their self-directed journeys.

Children are naturally curious. When extrinsic awards are introduced, such as high grades or candy, we operantly condition our kids to dismiss the knowledge and only crave the reward. A 2010 study conducted by Sugata Mitra supports this. He placed a computer in a room with children in India whom had never even heard of the Internet. After 8 hours, they figured out how to use a browser. This is without any prompts whatsoever from an adult. Within weeks the 12-year-old Tamil native speakers taught themselves English because that was the only language on the computer. After seeing how successful the children were doing, Mitra repeated the experiment in many different places, all yielding the same results. That’s when he decided to see how far it could go. He downloaded college-level molecular biology all in English and gave them an examination in the beginning and again after two months. When he came back, the children went from 0 to 30%. He then told a woman to act as a grandmother, simply telling the kids how smart they were and how she could have never done that as a kid. With the next examination, the children received passing scores. With this study, Mitra concludes that education, as we know it, is obsolete in this day in age.

With alternative school methodology seeming to be a success, it’s hard to feel like I have gotten the most out of my time in school. For the sake of my children, I hope education follows in Khan and Mitra’s direction. If we can stop wasting our time on things just because it’s the traditional way of doing something, we can create more intellectuals that engage with the world in a deeper way.