Today’s Education

At a prestigious college like Colby, one might think that reading a comic book is done in a student’s free time. Interestingly enough, Professor Howard believed this comic book would provide me a valuable and unique learning experience. Throughout reading this book, others questioned the academic use of the book by asking, “what class is that for?” and so on. For my research project, Professor Howard and I chose to display my research through a comic due to my interest in art. Luckily, the comic book, To Teach: The Journey in Comics, by William Ayers, could not only teach me about the theory side of education, but also show me how to convert theory into a comic. However, I had a greater takeaway about the topics the book covered. The book tried to capture how we as a society go about teaching our children and how we can improve this. According to Ayers, there is a lot of issues with the current system of education. We are so worried about test scores and grades that we really don’t follow what we love and are interested in.

In my reading, I repeatedly resorted to several conversations I’ve had with Professor Howard on the idea of understanding vs knowledge. Having understanding is something that will stick with you for a longer time and has deeper meaning to you. Conversely, knowledge is something that you have for a test and it often slips away with time. If we want students to have greater understandings, why do we continue to test them? We want to measure our progress and understandings in a course with this so called “test”, but most of the time  we just end up reinforcing an environment of cram studying and memorization. We do this to improve our knowledge before a test and lose that knowledge right after we take it. In my reading, I questioned: what can we change? This is another difficult question. Do we break down the entire system? How much would that actually change? Tests are great in theory because they provide a score for your performance and which makes it easier for colleges to sort you. In doing this, the people who aren’t good test takers, or those who aren’t motivated by subjects in school, do worse, and in a way aren’t accepted in our world.

In every direction I look for a different system, there is another issue. It seems to me that the education system itself is a flawed system; there’s no right or easy answer and that is why it hasn’t changed. In my eyes, we can be critical all we want but there should be a definitive answer that is better. Maybe I am wrong and there is a system that we are overlooking out there that works better or maybe I am also wrong for being critical of the critics. However, in my experience, nothing is perfect. Ultimately, people are so much different from each other that I think it is impossible to create a better system. There will always be someone that benefits and someone who loses from any system. We can try to slowly tweak and pivot the system in place but that will only marginally adjust it. The issues at hand are bigger than marginal, at least, according to the critics. If I were to get into every single thought that I had, this blog post would be a novel, so I won’t. Just ask yourself: is the current education system in place trying to better everyone’s education? If not, what should be done to change it?