It puzzles me, it really does about why I have an education. I find myself questioning myself on the purpose of my education and consequently the purpose of education as an entire entity.
Why do I choose to go to school? Why do we all have to go to school when most of us dislike it, when there are school drop-outs? Why and when did the act of "jigging" school come into society? What was the purpose of that? What was it about the system of education that triggered people to "jig" school?
If school was interesting, fun, and entertaining, we wouldn't have people skipping classes to go down to the shops or go home. They would stay in school.
I believe that the current system of education provides no direction nor purpose to the amount of study we must go through.
I currently wish to be a secondary mathematics teacher. I wonder if I spent 13 years of my life at school to build up all the necessary knowledge and skills required to be a maths teacher. If so, then I didn't need science, didn't need to study history or geography. It seems a perfect waste of time and resource to be spending all that time on things that provide no useful outlet if I became a maths teacher. If not, then what is my direction in life? Why did I spend 13 years at school for?
The answer is to breed educated people in society. The more educated, literate and civilized people there are in society, the faster the world can expand and grow. We attempt to raise university professors and scientists and mechanics and mathematicians and physicists and chemists and lawyers and doctors and all those high paying jobs. From businessmen to congressmen. But this raises a problem. If all we are doing is attempting to raise educated people, the society will not function, unless some dramatic change could be implemented to account for the abolition of certain services, one in particular is the garbage system.
Most people I would assume just take out the trash once every week for the garbage truck to drive around and dump it elsewhere. If there were only educated people in educated professions, then the garbage system of society would collapse. So not only would you have to account for another method of towing away garbage, you also need to rethink what the education system is doing. I would agree that most people are not inclined to take their own garbage to the dump once a week. The stench is intolerable. Not only do you need people in educated professions, the people in other professions which do not require the same extent of education and degrees, are just as important.
This brings me back to my point about the purpose of education. Why is it implemented the way it is? And why is there a hierarchy of courses? It's universal. At the top are the Mathematics and Sciences, followed by English and the Social Sciences, with Information Technology next and lastly, we have the Arts, which includes dance, drama, visual arts, industrial arts and music. I think this is unfair. In society, we need cabbages AND roses. They are equally important. The cabbages will always exist in society because of natural human instincts and reactions, but we need to preserve the roses.
Because of the existence of a hierarchy, this i believe deters people from attending school. Not everyone is Albert Einstein. Not everyone is Gauss or Goldbach. Not everyone is William Shakespeare. Some people do not possess that "gene" or talent. There are only so many Rain Man's. The hierarchy system will put down a student's true abilities, it dampens their will or motivation to reveal to the world what talent they have. If you are not good at maths, so what? You may be a fantastic actor/actress or a prodigy in music, but the education system does not allow that growth to that extent. Maths is ALWAYS the dominant subject. You may argue as much as you wish, but it is true in all societies.
So if we change the education system so that it directs the student's wishes and goals in life, enhancing the abilities that the student DOES have, then school would be more fun and entertaining, rather than a strenuous place to cram and jam information into a brain. I think we should embellish the creativity in students by making the Arts more valuable to society, more roses. The cabbages will always take care of itself due to human instinct, the need to survive, but roses need to be embellished.
I don't have too much knowledge on any education system except Australia, so I will focus on Australia. I understand the scaling system is to encourage students to pick the harder subjects, otherwise, everyone will be going for easy subjects and achieving great results. But the scaling system has such as big disparity, a gap too wide that it creates inequality within the education system and school surroundings. Picking Maths means you're smart and intelligent, not picking it means you're not. This is the stereotypical psychology that almost everyone adopts. I think this is remarkably wrong. I think dance and drama are just as important as Maths and Chemistry. Scaling them down is undermining and restricting the growth of creativity within students. We need to create a system where Drama and Dance and Music is just as valued as Maths and English. To create equality, we first of all need to abolish the scaling system or make it more equal. As far as I'm concerned, 4 unit Maths scales the most, so much in fact that it makes subjects like Dance look dead.
I still have not found the purpose of me attending school. What would my purpose have been, my goal be if I did not attend school? A sport star? The next Bill Gates? Who would know. We need to restructure education to make it more entertaining, make subjects more equal, educate more people, decreasing drop-out rates and enhancing the overall utility of education. It needs to be enjoyable and supposed to direct the student for future needs.
Not only should we be teaching students how to write, read, speak, calculate and memorize large quantities of information, we must also learn social skills, skills that will help in the future, marketing skills, and life skills. I am very supportive of people studying Community and Family Studies. It actually teaches you skills that you CAN use everyday to support a family. I mean, Maths is not going to make a family more intimate, for functional. Maths cannot take care of a child, and it certainly does not help you through meetings. I believe that people who do drama are better at these things, as they are more relaxed about meeting people, more open, expressive and positive.
I think society is not always right. The education system needs to be greatly reformed to enhance and bring forth the natural talent that students have instead of stigmatizing them. That way, there will be more educated people, combining their specialties together to prod the society into a civilization of technology and opportunity supported by creativity.
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