By Erin Kirsten Stein
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 13, 1997

School Sucks

Arizona Daily Wildcat Erin Kirsten Stein

The Washington Post recently ran a front-page story moaning that 40 percent of D.C.'s second- and

third-graders scored too low on standard tests to move on to the next grade.

President Clinton has this brilliant plan to test math and reading across the country, creating national academic standards.

According to Time magazine, 44 states are revising their standards and 5 other states are creating some for the first time.

Arizona State Senate Republicans proposed a cash bonus for teachers whose students score high on standard tests.

Standards and standardized testing. What the hell are these things and what exactly do they do?

They do absolutely NOTHING, but waste money.

SATs and ACTs are just alphabet soup.

Oh, but they measure achievement, and we can know if students are at the level they should be, and we can compare ourselves to other countries to see how smart we are, and we can use these scores to admit the 'smarter' students to universities, and ...

Stop the whining folks, and listen up.

Education in this country isn't educational. It's a load of crap.

What did you do in elementary school? Junior high? High school? Even in college?

You memorized.

Times tables, historical dates, nouns and verbs.

You repeated them, wrote them and spit them back in the teacher's face and you got a pat on the back called an 'A.'

Young people in this country are being dumped down by our educational institutions.

Education is not a one-way street, yet it is treated as such in many classrooms.

The bingeing and purging of information is an unhealthy epidemic prevalent in schools.

Kids aren't stupid, but they're taught with that assumption. Teacher knows best.

Here are my suggestions for some real educational reform.

Teach critical thinking skills and logic at an EARLY age.

Kids need to be given the skills and abilities to make their own judgments. When history and English and social studies are taught, kids are force-fed everyone else's conclusions and denied the opportunity to form their own.

Let the students decide for themselves if atomic bombs should have been dropped.

I propose that history be taught journalistically objective rather than interpretive.

Present the facts, ALL of them, and offer all viewpoints. Give students the whole picture, from all sides of the war. How did the Vietnamese feel? How did the French feel? Not just the Americans.

Children need to be given the knowledge, yes, but they also need to be taught how to APPLY it.

Even in universities, professors lecture to hundreds of students and expect verbatim regurgitation. It is knowledge seldom used or applied.

As every red-eyed student wandering the library knows, a research paper does not equal an applied learning experience.

Intelligence is in the application, not the knowledge.

I must admit that a few university professors have transcended the usual format. I once had a class that was more discussion than lecture, even though it was a large class. For the test, we had all the information, but we had to draw our own conclusions. I was impressed with that class, not for what I learned, but for how I learned it.

Here's another idea. Teach anatomy and bodily functions earlier.

Yes, I'm talking about sex education.

Kids have a right to know how their bodies work. It is not corruption or perversion to tell them their body has a purpose.

Rather than promote teen pregnancy, I think it would decrease it. When Susie and Billy start to have sex, they'll think, "HEY! Susie could get pregnant!"

That's called applying knowledge.

Teach kids about AIDS. Teach about osteoporosis, cancer and preventive medicine.

Kids can handle it.

Education today gives children the building blocks without the cement to hold them together.

Instead of pouring money into testing, how about pouring it into the schools?!

Wow! What a concept!

For a start, repair school buildings, hire more teachers so classes can be smaller, institute new creative learning programs, add more extra-curricular activities and raise teachers' salaries.

Every single one of you went to school. You know how education works (or doesn't work) in this country. Now apply some of that critical thinking, so highly touted at this university, and maybe you'll agree with me.

Or maybe you're too busy cramming for that midterm.

It's worth five points if you can remember the exact name of Cleopatra's aunt's cousin's cat.

(It was Whiskers.)

Erin Kirsten Stein is a senior majoring in creative writing, journalism and general fine arts studies.