by Matthew J. Geiger

Created on: October 08, 2009

The American education system is an endeavor dedicated to helping students with varying degrees of strengths and skills across a very large, very diverse nation achieve lifelong success. Consequently, the United States needs a far clearer approach to education versus admonishing one of our great social experiments based on results in other countries. To improve our educational system, we need to first provide direction by establishing uniquely American objectives. The world is forever changing rapidly to the point available knowledge cannot be possibly adsorbed by many of the world's most productive workers, thus America must become more dynamic by teaching students how to learn instead of specific benchmarks.

To ensure the American education system can create dynamic, life-long learners, a universal measure is required. Unfortunately, standardized tests primarily assess knowledge base with their very static questions versus evaluating concept training. For example, a book can reveal the distance from the Earth and the Sun, but the important science question is what kind of information would allow a student to calculate the answer and the important math query is whether or not the student can formulate a correct answer with that information. Only by evaluating the learning abilities of students in a variety of diverse subject areas can tests reveal students have been educated to learn throughout their lives.

The past does not guarantee the future, so students must learn to invent and innovate in order to compete in a global marketplace. This translates into a need for students to be able to explore areas of study where they have an opportunity to experiment and develop creative thinking. Unfortunately, pursuing counterproductive efforts, which narrow the spread of available classes and the focus of those classes to the severely limited assessment parameters of current standardized tests, appears to be the current trend in formal schooling. The maths, sciences, languages, and arts need to go beyond traditional curricula and classroom settings to encourage students to explore their world.

As a result, teaching tools need to support a more dynamic learning environment. While utilization of the internet allows teachers to take advantage of far more tools, items like textbooks and workbooks need to move away from a model where authors layout lessons to one where they support teachers and their lesson plans by providing relevant information and problem sets based on

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