How Children BeCome Indifferent to Public Education

In our world today schooling and learning are two separate entities, which need to become one if America wants to better its educational system, there needs to be more flexible classroom settings that allow students to engage in the learning experience. When you read about the problems with American education, you usually read statistics about literacy and dropout rates. But those statistics don’t do the subject justice because the problem with American education is a human story. Every dropout is a human being full of potential, every illiterate teenager is an person, and every kid that’s doing 20 to life is a real breathing person. In a country where we pride ourselves in giving free education to students, we are doing a horrible job in actually giving an education, with so many huge problems facing the school systems today many of which are overlooked and seen as normal. Problems such as unmotivated teachers, under funding of school programs that would enable classrooms to become more engaging, a lack of research based on how kids learn differently as we all know that each child does, and an often severely overlooked problem in peer bullying which many parents see as a ordinary part of growing up.

It is man’s natural curiosity to learn about things, all kinds of things and we see it most often in its purist form when looking at young children. It is impossible to have had any time to get to know a child and not know of a time when they would ask a question in eagerness to learn, or show off some knowledge they had gained earlier in the day, they are still at a stage where learning is exciting. How can it be that humans yearn for knowledge just when they are young , but once they enter kindergarten they no longer are, what happened to the rest of their lives? We don’t just want to attain knowledge when we are young, we are learning machines, it is the reason we have developed so immensely since man was first created, unfortunately children often become indifferent to learning once they

For a significant percentage of kids in our nation’s school system, survival is the only goal. Students are often not assessed in their learning properly, when memorization is a key to getting ahead, students do not learn actual material, but instead the just learn how to mimic. But learning isn’t just memorization, it being able to form your own thoughts and ideas and being able to back those beliefs up. I would often times find myself thrown into a classroom at the beginning of the school year, with kids who had very different goals then I and how that first week of class could either make or break my enthusiasm for an entire semester. I was once told something that unfortunately many of my peers whose parents were caught up in some love triangle involving drugs, alcohol and abandonment did not get to hear but it is what motivated me through those years of pre colligate schooling, it was one day after school when I was complaining about having to do my boring schoolwork that was sent home that nobody else even did and how they still passed, and through the mist of my complaints my Dad stopped me and said “You have to choose to do well in school they give you resources to learn, you have to use them, re-teach yourself if you have to.”

In the essay Rose says that if you set the bar higher kids will try to reach it, in his case when the bar was set so low, he no longer felt the need to try. In situations where the bar is set so low it is easy for kids to want to turn off their learning side knowing that if they fail it was in a situation where they most certainly should have succeeded, but everyone makes mistakes and with programs that do not challenge it is easier to make those embarrassing mistakes. When your mind can wonder because the material in front of you is not engaging enough, simple mistakes are made