Why Educate? :: Essays Papers

Why Educate?As I ponder what my educational ism is, and what I hope it will become, I find it necessary to attend why we educate our children in the first place, and why we finance unnumbered public school systems with local tax dollars and federal funds only when to hear over and over that schools are failing, our teachers are inadequate, and our students unprepared for life. The volume of high school graduates can read. They can perform basic arithmetic. They hunch forward some literature, history, and civics. They are more computer literate than ever before, but the U.S. Department of instructions National Commission on Excellence in Education concludes in A Nation at RiskIf an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational carrying out that exists today, we might well drop viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in achievement shake off in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarming (NCREL 2002). This educational disarmament is really a failure to produce students that are truly combative in the world marketplace, a failure to make the same expert advances as other industrialized nations. Joel Spring, in The American School (1997), asserts that ascendant with the pieceing of the common school in the nineteenth century, education has been seen as a way of ending poverty, providing equality of opportunity, and an increasing national riches (6). It is the increasing national wealth that students are tested on now, and found lacking. According to Sebastian de Assis, author of Teachers of the World, Unite (2000), it was during the Industrial Revolution that mathematics, sciences, technical and vocational education became pivotal to the sustenance of the new economic order in the United States (p. 24). Students have become just another part of the corking machinery that is America. Either they contribute and make the country, and themselves, richer, or they are failures, who have, in turn, been failed by an educational system that did not teach them how to grow rich or help the nation grow rich.Like de Assis (2000), I find the commoditization of students to be more than a little disturbing.