Why is education not a priority?

Day in and day out, it seems that kids are getting dummer and dummer. When I entered High School I was amazed at the number of people who didn’t know simple geography, math, and science. Then the show “are you smarter than a fifth grader” came out, and the proceptions how smart a fifth grader can be changed drastically. Harvard graduates couldn’t even win. This confused me, why are the smart gifted fifth graders being potrayed as average, and the less intellectual gifted students being neglected? This is a problem that I do not think will be solved anytime soon, however, I beilieve that both the home and the governent is to blame for this problem. The home is being changed forever, instead of family values being taught at home, children are forced to learn from teachers and counselors what they should do instead of asking their parents for help. This not only seperates the parent/child connection, but prohibits the child from wanting to ask questions from adults. They can’t ask their parents for help, and who wants to ask questions from strangers? So the child consequently remains ignorant of the solution. This habit continues into the classroom, the child begins to beilieve that they must rely on themselves to find the answers, and what they must learn, they already know or understand. The confortation occurs when Parents blame the school, and the school blames the parents. The percentage of parents that show up to PTA meetings is not nearly as staggering as the number of parents who do not show up. When the child remains ignorant, they become a problem, and which teacher wants to deal with problems. My mother is a teacher and gossips frequently about teachers who ignore disruptive childeren and only focus on the students who want to learn. According to the National Education Association the average teachers’ salary barely skims 40,000 dollars a year.  This hardly seems enough to fund the people who are responsible for the future of America.  This, to me seems to be the main problem. The childeren who are ignorant want attention, become disruptive, and the teachers simply ignore them. The parents tend make matters worse when they have to come in and talk to teachers “shocked” to hear their sweet little angel is a disruption. So, everybody is taking a blind eye to these neglected childeren. Very few teachers truly care about their students enough to confront the troublemakers to a point where they want to learn from a teacher who has guts enough to care about a student like them. Parents need to take more initionative with their children’s education and not simply rely on the public education system to solely teach their system. To me, that is just stupid, if you want to believe that the government who is filled with people who went to prep shcools, and private education centers will send the tax money to public shcools, your dead wrong. This is where the government takes blame, because they rely too much upon the home to teach childeren, they are totally neglecting a majority of students who are just passing through the public school system and not truly learning enough to impact, (not function) but impact society. If this tradition continues, what will our country become, a small pool of private schoolers who learn, and kids are continued to bbe neglected, because “they don’t care about learning” Bull sh**, they don’t care because they haven’t learned to learn. Their parents have placed the blame on the government, and the government has placed a blame on the home, so while your finger pointing contest is going on, you childeren, our future is going down the tubes. So its all of our faults, but until the government puts more money into it, and the parents at least care enough to show up to PTA meetings, education will not be a priority.

James Butters

~ by english131blog on December 4, 2007.