Jillian's Blog!

Today, one of the biggest problems in education in my opinion, is the teaching of life skills. Teachers mainly focus on the basic skills such as maths, sciences, and language arts, and don't put nearly as much emphasis on the basic life skills such as creative problem solving, cooperation, communication, leadership, and most importantly, they don't particularly emphasize individualism.  The more the focus is set on only one solution to every problem, the more unified the students thinking process will become. Well that's a great thing because that means standardized test scores will rocket, right? How can you compare successful standardized test over turning our children into thoughtless drones; having the same answer to every problem, possessing no creativity. 

Those students who don't grasp the concept the first time it is taught get the short end of the stick. They might not be able to ask questions because they are to busy trying to figure out how the teacher came up with a certain answer, and by the time they have the opportunity to ask a question, another student will ask a question about a completely unrelated topic which will send the teacher in a completely different direction with the discussion, leaving the student hanging on for dear life at the back of the subject train. If we desire to have a nation filled with people from an array of backgrounds and a mass of different view points, why aren't we instilling this idea of diversity into our children as they go through the most influential behavior-instilling time of their lives? Why are we teaching them that there is only one right solution, and any other way is wrong, even if they produced the same answer and can duplicate it several times given different variables? 


These limits prohibit the young minds of our future to flourish, it keeps them from realizing their true potential. Isn't the true meaning of education to better prepare our children for their future? So why are we restricting them? Are we going to dim them down to fit the standards of everyone else or are we going to let them shine to their full potential?