How many time have you sat in a classroom
and wondered to yourself “how this will ever be applicable to my life?” So
often, throughout the lives of students we are forced into classes we probably won’t
even remember the day after we write that final exam or submit that final assignment.
To what extent is this information useful? Should I be able to recite the
quadratic formula or tell you that the mitochondria is the power
house of a cell. If these things aren’t going to be useful in my life what is
the point of drilling them into my head or telling me I can’t pass high school if
I can’t perform well on a standardized test.
Just to be clear, I am not
against education. In fact, I am a university student planning on working
within the education system. I am here to do what university has taught me. Which
is to be critical of every “fact” that I encounter.
If you
stop to really think about education, who creates it?? Yup, the government. The
very people that don’t play a prominent or large visible role in a school, get
to make all the decisions for every child in Ontario.
These are the people that determine
funding based on scores of standardized tests and the names associated with
schools. The government is funding private schools to help the elite, when
lower income schools can barely afford to have equipment for children to play
with because that money is desperately need for teaching supplies. These people
aren’t the one’s sitting in the classroom as a nine-year-old has a mental
breakdown and has to leave the room because he can’t comprehend what is being
asked on an EQAO test. How can they be
the ones to make the decisions without these personal experiences?
The very people that have one of
the largest roles to play in a child’s life can also have the largest role in breaking
a child. For what?? Just so standards make us competitive with other countries
around the world. At what point do we
step back and look at children’s wellbeing and mental health around certain
aspects of our education system.
School is just a way for
governments to control children to serve for them and their agendas. If you
look at education around the world, certain countries make it almost impossible
to get a higher education. Why is that you ask?? Well… the second higher education
becomes a standard, people will start to question the way they rule and can
change the government’s actions.
In Canada, many people couldn’t begin
to accept the idea that a child couldn’t attend school. This is all because of
our shaped ideas surrounding education. However, in poorer parts of the world
education isn’t mandatory and doesn’t have an overall large impact on the population.
On average, 66% of people without an education are living on the streets, yet
55% of people with a full education are also living in poverty. So, is it worth
it??
This is all connected to the governments
idea of education, and their plans for the people that receive this education.
Without even knowing you, the government has a generalized plan based on how
successful they believe you are going to be. So essentially, they decide your worth
based on a bunch of statistics.
Despite all this, there is a value
in education. I just believe that certain things do not work within our current
society and we need to be critical consumers around the information that is
being fed to our children and ourselves.