Education Essay, Research Paper

WHAT ARE SCHOOLS FOR?

School an institution, a building, a safe haven, and a learning place bursting with education to teach our young people. With teachers who are devoting their entire life into providing a sound foundation and opening new horizons to broaden their minds with a world of knowledge.

School a place where parents or guardians send their most prized possession, their children, to learn. School alone cannot bring about the educational results we need, parents must take more responsibility and interest. All children are capable of learning and no child should be permitted to fail, as an old proverb said: It takes the whole village to raise a child. Together the results will be rewarding.

Excellence in education is possible today if we teach our students to read, write, understand the written word, master standard English, appreciate hard work, have self-respect and respect for others, seek values, and shun crass materialism. (Alexander, P4)

Learning is more than books, materials, and facts, it s a process that comes with time. Values are also important factors of learning and of life. Respect is one of those values. To understand that there may be more than one way to do something well. Respect is remembering that all living things are part of nature. Respect is honoring wisdom that comes with age. Respect is accepting differences in people. Perhaps it is time to start swinging the pendulum back toward an emphasis on responsibility, and wisdom. (Ebel, P1)

Our schools are competing with the outside world to make school interesting. There are many things that lure the attention away from schoolwork, such as, television, drugs, sex, computers, high-tech toys, and adolescent culture. Bruckner believes school should be a place where adolescents feel at home, a place that they might want to come to even if they didn t have to go. Bruckner has tried to accomplish this by harnessing non-traditional means to traditional academic goals. The bright students have no ceiling on their ambitions to learn and to succeed. All the students bright, average, or below average, should have a strong basic curriculum available and a diversity of learning opportunities; which will allows them to learn at their own pace and all students regardless of race or religion should be treated equally.

President Clinton stated When I became president, one of the things that really bothered me was that our country was the only advanced economy in the world that didn t have an organized system to make sure that every student who didn t go on to college at least had a chance to continue their education by blending school and work. We call it now school-to-work opportunities. (Clinton, P1) Many students are not college bound, we need to get serious and direct them into vocations, which would be enjoyable to them and benefit our Nation.

Teachers , how do we describe this human being? He or she must be intelligent, personable, motivated, creative, dedicated, and gifted all rolled into one.

We as 2000 educators need to provide more than facts and figures we need to show compassion and love for our students. What we are and what we believe can make the difference in how we project ourselves. Schools are structures, curriculums are our guidelines, but our knowledge, our experience, and the way we deliver this information will determine how it s received and absorbed. We must be accountable for the performance of our pupils and their learning environment.

Teacher s observations and record keeping can yield a rich harvest of information that can be used to help each child. These observations are more important than any standardized tests. Teachers can check on student s progress in many subjects, they can display their speaking skills through oral presentations and book talks. A portfolio of their writing skills and writing in process, noting their vocabulary development by words used in their writing. Standardized test should work along with student s everyday performance. Yet our system continues to use only the results of the standardized test to judge them. We need to use a range of assessments to find out what kids know.

Homework is the link between home and school. (Sands, P6) Homework assignments should reinforce subject matter, which was introduced in class. Students need to be able to be creative. A little creativity goes a long way in designing homework that is relevant to students lives. (Boers, P6) Homework also allows parents to become involved in their children s education. Depending on the needs of each school, there may be situations where parents might need help in helping their child. Multicultural families need to learn English both home and at school allowing them to aid their child with homework.

Many times supervisors and teachers are afraid to butt the system, with new and innovated ideas. So many times the bureaucrats are making the decision from the out-side looking in instead of from the inside-out. Bracken encourages teachers to design their own courses and to take more responsibility for school affairs.

Our 20th century technology can be an asset to us as educators by allowing us to collaborate our methods and curriculum to a common goal. By this I mean, we can review and discuss our success and failures, with what works and what doesn t work. With the use of computers the knowledge we can learn from each other is endless.

One of the big problems were are facing today is a shortage of good teachers, so many of our bright and motivated young people are not looking to enter the world of teaching. Why? The answer is obvious, money. The starting salary does not compete with our growing business world. Teachers reach their top earning capacity in less than eight years, with nowhere to go except out of the classroom. (Hechinger, P6) Understandably, the best science and math teachers, already in dangerously short supply, are entering higher paying jobs in private industry. Steps must be taken to make teaching an exciting and promising career. Major increases in salary and advancement opportunities must be instituted or the amount of intelligent young people willing to commit their lives to teaching will continue to lessen, ultimately affecting our future. Those who say education is too expensive, one can only reply, would you prefer ignorance? (Hechinger, P7)

Putting excellence back into our educational system is not impossible, but it must happen in the classroom but we must stop allowing children and young adults to be moved through the educational system without the ability to read, write, and compute. Student s who are deficient of these skills will severely limit their ability to function effectively in our society.

Our educational system has endured several decades of upheaval. It bore the brunt of civil rights movement teachers, strikes, parent s boycotts, desegregation measures, overcrowding; shortage of qualified teachers at all levels. Schools are trying to educate the slow learners, the handicapped, the gifted, the affluent and poor, plus millions of immigrants and refugees who do not understand English.

Most youngsters will not take rigorous courses or work hard at school because there s no provided incentives. Today most young people can t get a decent job after high school no matter how hard they worked in school, and most kids can get into some college even though they did horrible in school. What kind of a message is this! Business must start to reward the hard working students, with better jobs at better wages. Work with schools to make the work place available for the kinds of integrated academic-vocational experiences this nation needs to build a school-to-work transition system. (Lund, P1)

Our business world has not made a significant impact on schools. When we look at the skill level of people entering our work force, we find a 50 percent failure rate of possible employees when they are tested with 8th grade material.

America, truly the land of opportunity, yet our schools, which holds the key to the future of our country drags on fighting our government for funds, smaller classes, and better opportunities for our children. These are the same kids that will be running our nation in years to come.

Will the typical kid be able to handle tougher standards? Absolutely! I think they are as bright as ever in terms of raw intelligence, desire and so forth. I have no doubt those young people are willing to do more if we expect it of them. (Gardner, P6) We must take the lead in order to compete with our neighboring countries.

When you compare schools in United States of America as opposed to a country like Africa where families can not afford to send their children to school, their worth is needed at home to work as laborers. African schools are housing classes of 100 students in extremely deficient conditions, no water, or electricity. Books, desks, and equipment must be shared under the roof of their decrepit buildings. According to the United Nations Children s Fund around forty million children in Sub-Saharan Africa get no basic teaching. (Unicef, P1)

At an Education for All conference in 1990, all but two of the world s governments pledged that universal basic education would exist by 2015. But by then, at current rates, about 75 million children, most of then in Africa, will have none! (Hassan, P2)

On the other side of the spectrum we can compare our system with Japan, Canada, Soviet Union, Sweden, France, West Germany, and Britain. Our standard exam scores do not measure up. The average school day in these countries is seven hours and the school years run 210 days, ours 180 days. Their curriculum is also far more demanding than ours. They are asking for more from their students and they are getting it. For example the Japanese are building better cars, Germans are making more machine tools. Japan is graduating three times as many electrical engineers than we are.

If enough people around the world learn to read and write it will improve our economy and everybody can get much more out of life.

Everything about us is changing; the make up of our population; family groups and patterns of family living; the nature of our economy and the demands of the workplace; the dramatic realignments of nations and cultures on the world scene, and our increasingly threatened economic preeminence; the capacity of technology to transform our lives; our knowledge of the universe and of ourselves. (Sobel, P1) We as a nation must take rein and more forward, what worked in the 1900 may not work in the 2000 s. We are running out of time either we make the changes in the way we raise and educate our children for this new century or we will sink into mediocrity.

In summary schools are for learning for a better today and brighter tomorrow.