by Joshua Simmet

Created on: October 15, 2009

One of the major talks of the news these days is of Obama's plans to lengthen the school year, because he claims that the children do not get enough of an education from the current schooling year. He cites the schooling records of other, leading countries such as Japan and Sweden, which both have school years that are quite a bit longer than the United States.

His belief is that the current schooling system in place in the US is working perfectly, that the only problem with it is that the teachers do not have enough time to pack as much information into their students head. With a longer school year, and possibly longer school days, the scores of students will raise bringing the US into a new and unexplored era of knowledge and learning.

However there is one large and fundamental flaw in this line of thinking, and that is this; the current schooling system is broken. It does not work. The real world does not work in the way that students are taught in schools. Not only that but the way that students are currently taught is the teachers, generally, present the students with large amounts of information that they are expected to memorize, in a relatively short amount of time, and then they move on. Until they reencounter the information on the exams be it midterm or final.

The application of the things they learn are generally passed by or glossed over. In math classes the teacher will take maybe ten minutes out of his or her lecture to describe the way that an equation can be used in an everyday situation. After that they may encounter an application problem on a test or worksheets, yet the one short explanation will, in all likelihood, not prepare them for such a problem.

History is an excellent subject to learn, it teaches students of mistakes made in the past and the ways that it could have been avoided. Yet the "ways it could have been avoided" part is often glossed over. The teacher just presents a timeline or a long and often boring lecture on the events leading to an event with no mention, let alone discussion, of alternative paths that could have been taken to avoid the outcome.

Another problem with the school system is highlighted nicely in a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson; Do Schools kill Creativity? In his talk Sir Robinson explains that the emphasis on math and sciences in schools is creating a system geared towards the education of University professors. With cuts in the arts (music, art, dance) the schools are slowly killing off creativity in students. People claim that the sciences are fundamentally more important than the arts because of the contributions it has made to the world. Yet without creativity in the people that develop those leaps we would still believe that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the world.

By educating students to broaden their minds and to "think outside the box" we create students that will grow into scientists and mathematicians... that will actually make a difference in their fields. With that creativity the future scientists will create progress that outstrips the progress made in the last hundred years.

Extending the school year is not enough to fix the problems in the school system, only a complete overhaul in the system can do that.

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