by Colt Sliva

Created on: December 14, 2008

School boards across America have been searching for the solution to teach kids quickly and efficiently. There have been ideas from testing to competencies and yet the school board is not satisfied. Children are still failing or dropping out and adults are baffled. The educational system is flawed because it fails to acknowledge that students learn differently, they learn at different paces, and not every person is destined to go to college. It is teaching 101 that every kid has a

different style of learning. Rather than pushing students through a funnel of kindergarten to the twelfth grade, why not determine early in the child's development what sort of learning style they have. Then the newly instated students could be placed into classes depending on how they learn. The educational environment would naturally evolve into exactly what the students would need to thrive in our world. In addition, as we push kids through this funnel, some fail and are held back. Others are placed in special education classes. None of these programs reach the heart of the problem. The children who are learning slower than others do not need to take the same class over again. The students really need teacher interaction. If a child is learning the same content that he or she didn't understand before, why would they understand it when it was repeated? The child will only truly understand when the teacher directly addresses their problem. Concurrently, not every student is meant to go to college. That's blasphemy! Right? We set up our kids with college funds when they are just little wee ones and yet if every student went to college then society as we know it would collapse due to lack of laborers. The labor venue is far larger than the jobs that require a higher education. Even with this knowledge the education system still emphasizes that you MUST go to college because then you'll get paid more. This emphasis in fact puts tremendous stress on the students to get good grades and please their superiors. This stress slows down the child's leaning process and makes their learning environment an uncomfortable one. The perfect educational system does not exist, but we can create a system which will allow students to feel better about learning and create a healthy environment for them to prosper in. Parents everywhere can inspire this turn of events in education by being a catalyst at their local school board meetings. The people are the makers of change in a democratic system. We are the change.

Learn more about this author, Colt Sliva.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.