Failing

We’re all failing education.

We all have to go to school, but we don’t get an education.

John D. Rockefeller funded and shaped the current public education. He wanted a generation of workers. These schools taught children how to sit for eight hours and not question authority. It’s been our reality since then.

These are future workers, parents, teachers, voters.

Molding one generation after another. Conditioning us. Telling us what to think instead of thinking for ourselves.

It’s every government’s dream. To control a nation of people who have taught conformity their entire lives.

The government likes it. Billionaires love it.

Now we all have to go to a government funded day care that feels more like a prison so our parents can work all day. The cycle continues.

We follow a system that doesn’t reward us. We don’t become resilient adults. We don’t know what we want to do in life. School doesn’t teach us skills we need to be independent thinkers. It keeps us busy. Distracted. We don’t get an education.

Most of our learning is done outside of school hours. Through play. Through reading. Visiting museums. Creating, innovating, discovering who we are. But we don’t get time for that. Because we have homework.

Hours and hours of homework. Stuff that we don’t learn in class. Homework was designed as a punishment for unruly students. It limits our creativity. Our time with our family. And it takes away our joy of learning.

Standardized tests don’t test our knowledge. It another invention to keep kids quiet for two hours. Corporations rake in billions of dollars a year off of standardized tests.

This system has us equating our worth to test scores. To questions written by people who have never taught. The system failed us.

So many of us prefer death over failure.

And it’s equally as bad for teachers. Teachers feel like glorified babysitters. Imagine spending so much time and money to get a degree in education, just to spend only two hours teaching and six hours doing paperwork.

The average class size in America is twenty-seven students. Teachers are underpaid and overworked. They’re just as burnt out as the students.

Not to mention the ever-present threat of gun violence.

The curriculum isn’t engaging. It’s uniform.

Our students are taught by one-twenty-seventh of a human being. An exhausted human being.

So who gets an education?

The elite. The people with money. People who can afford private school. People who live in rich areas that get more funding.

It’s to keep a class inequality. The schooled and the educated. The workers and the employers. Rich and poor.

This is what John D. Rockefeller designed. What he envisioned. He got his generation of workers. Generation after generation. Decade after decade. The cycle continues. `

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Finland proves it, showed the world that change can occur. Finland didn’t always have the best education system. It was rigid, unequal, and limited. It used to be what we have now.

Then in the 70s, they changed it.

They gave teachers autonomy to plan their own curriculums. They eliminated homework. They limited standardized assessments. The goal was for children to give the best learning experience possible, to cultivate the joy of learning they can carry on for the rest of their lives.

And the results speak for themselves. Finland places highly international test scores. Students stay longer in education. Educational inequality was a thing of the past.

Children are happier.

This is a system that works.

The system we have in America is failing us. It’s failing our future. Gen Z is the first generation that isn’t smarter than their parents.

Education is a lifeline, a ticket to mobility, a stone to build upon. Youth is the time to mold, to discover, and if not used effectively, it’s just time wasted.

If Finland can do it, so can we.