The Government is Asking for Your Opinion!

Posted in on Aug 07, 2010 - 01:35 PM

Head on over to ed.gov/blog, and see the post, "What is the biggest challenge today in education?". It's odd that there aren't like a million comments on this blog site, but either way, you should head over and speak your peace. I have commented about student choice.
"As a recently graduated k-12 student, I feel the biggest challenge in education is having public schools seriously consider student choice in education. For the most part, youth have very little say in what subjects they can learn or spend time on. When it comes to education, everyone is racing to do things for others, asking for freedom for teachers, administrations, and everyone but the students, the people and citizens that this system is supposed to be serving. Not once have students been seriously considered during the adoption of all these policies for any say. Students cannot evaluate their teachers or schools. If they have a specific academic interest they want to spend the majority of their time on, they must yield to the assignments that are mandatory. In addition to this, students are stifled by academic and intellectual standardization, as well as an overload of external motivation. Our brains, abilities, and personalities are much too diverse to have people expected to know the same things on the same level at the same age. Even if the new standards are just guidelines and markers, standardization is counterproductive to innovation. External motivation will also burn out more so than personal intrinsic motivation to learn.
So, what is the biggest challenge? Student empowerment and choice in learning.
Then comes:
Lack of diverse approaches to schooling. Lack of EQUALITY for all members of a school, especially students, in making decisions in response to diverse environments, skills, communities, and situations. Top-down authoritarian environments in which students and teachers have no say, and in which students are just expected to sit down and learn with no opportunity for input in choices made about their learning, is the total opposite of democracy."
"Correction to students being consulted. A group of students have been asked about how to get youth into college, according to one of your posts. Other than that, students are not involved in making changes to their education."

My comments are awaiting moderation. That sounds scary since it's a government blog. It makes me feel like my opinion also won't make it, and that I'll get monitored on my blogs or something to see if I'm a heavy dissenter. I've seen and heard too many scary stories about phone conversations, activists and the FBI, and watch-lists I suppose.

Either way, "make your voice heard"!

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