As Summer draws to a close, our envelopes arrive. Inside of them we receive the many papers and forms telling us that school is starting yet again. School is the dreaded thing in our lives, many of us see it as a waste but is it really a waste? I mean sure we spend an such a profound amount of time at school that it really just seems like it is just a waste. The teachers, principals, and just about everyone tells us that school is for a reason, that it is preparing us for the real world. Yet how can a school prepare us for the real world, for our lives after school when they don’t teach us what we want to learn. For example, I want to be a Computer Scientist, to prepare for my life and profession I must code, I must do things like write this blog. Yet those skills are all things that I have learned on my own without the help of the institution that claims to mold young minds into adults ready for the world. Why then is it that High School doesn’t give me a specialized school experience just for Computer Science, or just for music, or just for sports, or whatever it may be.
The School’s Reasoning
Obviously any teacher or school administrator will say that they do what they have to because they don’t have a choice, or that a specialized education is for college. Well to all of them, I say they are wrong. We live in a day and age where nothing is impossible if someone sets their mind to it. More importantly we live in a world where it is possible for schools to do many things, that they choose todo. Sure they have reasons but those reasons are wrong.
The most famous reason is of course money. Schools need money to run and with the economy in the state it is in schools do not get all the state and federal funding that they used to. So their first response is to cut things they deem not needed, such as specialized classes, like AP Computer Science. See a schools thinking is that if only five to ten people sign up for a class then clearly it is not important and able to be cut. Now I know that a part of this is due to me being angry over it being cut the year I was going to take it.
My issue though is that they cut that yet waste money in other places. For example, my school has paid to have our website redesigned three times since I started going to school here. It amazes me that they paid as much as they did for awfully dated designs that do not even work properly. Add on the fact that their are many kids that do web design like myself, why not have one of us or a group of us design the site for them, it would look good and it would have modern design principals to it. It would also create an image of the students, teachers, and administrators working together.
The Sad Truth
The sad truth of the matter though is simple the fact that public school is corrupt. There is no way around this truth. In the American Education system administrators for the most part are not corrupt but also aren’t really that devoted to the Students’ educational experience. Our schools are run by school boards which are perhaps some of the most useless politicians in the country. Most of the people on school boards are people that feel that they need to be in a position of power no matter how useless a position it is. In the grand scheme of things no one honestly cares if that person was a school board member or not. They our useless, most of them have no political experience at all, let alone how to manage a budget in the upward numbers of many millions of dollars that is required to run a school district.
The reason when people have the option to send their kids to private school that they do send them, is simple because they want to avoid the bureaucratic crap that is public school. Now don’t get me wrong their is of course corruption and bureaucratic issues with private school but, private schools don’t have to deal with the many state and federal regulations that public schools do. This allows them to actually say that they put the needs of the students in front of everything. We would live in a perfect world if any school you went to was like this but sadly that isn’t the case. In an age where the government wants to cut spending everything education keeps getting hit, but the things are getting hit are all the things that shouldn’t be hit like the arts.
It seems in most cases that when it comes to spending the things that are cut are what shouldn’t be yet schools can manage to do things like spend a ridiculous amount of money on things that athletics don’t need but they get anyway. I’m not saying the spending shouldn’t happen but it should be equalized, everything should get cuts if cuts need to be made. If the school needs to save let’s say $100,000 for a year, don’t just cut all that from one section or department, equalize it. Make the whole school deal and there will be less dissent against all the students and teachers and instead focused mainly on the politicians and such that cause the cuts to have to happen.