Lessons from Kindergarten: Mixed Messages of the Modern Education System
As a graduate of kindergarten, I like to think I came out of the experience with quite a few life lessons under my belt. There was the basic ABCs and 123s, don’t eat the glue, and always wash your hands. Of course, though, there were some things that were more important. Those lessons that developed me as a person and as a friend, a student and a member of a community.
It occurs to me now, fourteen years later, that some of those lessons have been neglected by the education system. Education has failed me and my peers, the instructors who work for it, and even our society as it produces graduates unprepared for the workforce. Maybe it could take a few lessons from kindergarten to heart.
Today is a good day to learn something new…
…but we’re still going to make you memorize facts, then regurgitate them for us on your final exam. Learning should not be restricted to reciting all the verb conjugations of ‘escribir’ and memorizing formulas of aeronautical principles. Learning should be messy, involving mistakes and discovery. We should be having conversations in Spanish and applying formulas to designing our own airfoils. The technologies and methods for deep learning have been developed, but still we are restricted to memorization and standardized tests, instead of understanding and exploration. We are told to sit criss-cross applesauce, with hands in our laps, instead of getting a hands-on experience.
You can be anything you want to be…
…as long as it is one of our predefined majors, you are prepared to jump through hoops if it is not currently a course of study offered, and you know what you want to be right now. Time and again, I am told that most of the jobs that my peers and I will be filling do not yet exist. With a future as open-ended as that, we should be free to study what interests us without worrying about satisfying cookie-cutter-major credits or being pressured into studying jobs that make money now but might not exist in the future. Schools are pigeon-holing us into set majors, instead of teaching us the tools we will need to succeed in ambiguous future workplaces; those soft skills like effective communication and creativity, problem solving. Only interdisciplinary studies will give us the breadth of topic we will need to start thinking innovatively. It is time for schools to let us pursue our passions and insist on soft skills and breadth of study if we are to survive our working years. When you ask a room full of kindergarteners what they want to be when they grow up, you can expect everything from astronaut to president to superhero to be among the responses. But if you were to ask a sampling of college students, half of them would say they are studying business, while the other half might be studying for a life in front of a computer screen. I, for one, am excited for the day that the responses of the college students are just as varied as the kindergarteners’.
Sharing is caring.
However, it is no secret that inequality exists in America’s educational system. Good schools are often such because they belong to affluent neighborhoods where parents can afford to give more money to the school system so they can become better schools so their children can get a good education to get better jobs, so they in turn can afford to send their children to good schools. And the cycle continues. If America has any hope of breaking this feedback loop to give all children an equal starting point, resources should be spread between various school districts, creating equal school systems for the next generation. Maybe then, America will have a chance of ending the perpetual cycle of inequality, and every child will feel like they have a place on the playground, and later, a seat at the table.
Listen to your teacher; they deserve your respect.
But apparently, they don’t deserve fair compensation for working far beyond their contract hours grading papers on the weekends, for spending entire days without bathroom breaks, for paying for classroom supplies out of their own pockets, and doing far more than imparting knowledge to their students. Teachers arguably have one of the most important positions in a society, as they shape the future. Yet they do not receive enough recognition; in fact, the country is facing a teacher shortage as the unpopularity of the profession grows. It’s time teachers were given fair compensation for their work, and it’s time our society thanked them. It’s no less than our Ps and Qs demand.
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
But we’re still going to teach all of you the exact same thing in the exact same way. We will continue to judge your performance by an impersonal and standardized metric and reduce your academic competency to a few numbers that will determine most of your future. It is proven that no two children’s brains are the exact same, yet classrooms treat students as if they can all learn the same way. Standardized tests like the SAT and ACT have the power to determine our future, but are a single metric meant to get across the entire range of capabilities a single person possesses. And does a poor job at that. It’s far past time we found other metrics to measure student success. Measurement of student progress across years, and measurement of softer skills such as communication and problem solving should augment the traditional testing of hard skills like math and reading comprehension. That may not solve all the problems with standardized testing, but it would be a step in the right direction, and students might finally feel like they really are as unique as their colorful fingerprints from their kindergarten artwork.
For all its faults, the modern education system is not entirely broken yet. It just needs to learn to change with the times. Somehow, in the past 150–200 years, the growth of education has stagnated. The current classroom setup, the standardized test, and the eight-hour school day were all innovations at the time of their implementation. Despite some recent incorporations of technology into the system, the change is not widespread enough to have the substantial impact we need. There is a wealth of research in the cognitive sciences, education, and human development that we could draw on to start implementing real changes. While education is responsible for producing innovators, it has failed to produce any serious innovations for itself. Maybe, it should go back to the basics, to kindergarten, for inspiration.
Whether you’re an educator/administrator who wants to better understand and serve your students, an entrepreneur/technologist who wants insights directly from potential users, or a student who cares deeply about education and wants to be a part of the movement to transform its future, subscribe today to the EdSurge Independent newsletter.
