how do we fix the education system in this country? how do we teach its ok to think for yourself?

Question

no one has time to teach our children to use their brains and the schools have become overgrown babysitters, underpaid and overworked.

Answer 1

I think school lacks trust in kids and specially teenagers.
School wants to teach the kids how to think....like that didn't come naturally inherited with every human being.
It's like they want to take control and want to analise everything so they can make the little graphs.
Kids think for themselves....everybody hears about that little kid in the backseat of a car, with his seatbelt on, looking outside at the people, the shops while the mom drives around.
He's always asksing "Why that woman fat?" "Why do teenagers look like they were all dressed by the same mother?"
Things like that. They can make very hard questions because they're just new to this world and it's like they're a radar for the routinous things we (adults and teenagers) see everyday and they see it in a completly diffrent way. And that's good. It makes hte world intellectually evolve.
Seeing things in a completly diffrent way is what the world needs. It's what Einstein did, It's what Edison did, da Vinci...do I need to name more?
The system built itself into what it is today because it's just convenient. Questioning, which is what kids and teenagers do naturally, can be considered as incovenient....you can only question about the subjects at school. And if you're in a Physics class and ask about Time travel everybody thinks you're crazy and the teacher says "You've been watching too many sci-fi movies" and you can never have a good conversation with them because most of them doens't have the patience to talk with students about subjects outside of the school program. Therefore, most kids, who have no idea about what's happening around them, grow to believe that you're dependant in school and teachers to learn well and be sucessful and be happy.
I think it's a shame that "School" is the only way to get an "official education". If you've been through school, then you're competent to be the head of a company. If you dropped out, you're good to work at macdonals because you seemed to be uninterested in Biology. Yet Edison patented his first invention at the age of 15, already out of school for a long time. I know we don't live in the 19th century but great discoveries and inventions can still be made...but not if they're kept in repetitive routine being told what to do. If they were told to be creative and original and different, that would be ok, but that's not what the schools are doing. Why? Inconvenience in a lot of fields that government has control over.
It annoys me, being a teenage student, that if you have bad grades in a subject you're called ignorant and lazy and irresponsible when you simply don't like the subject....they call you lazy because you didn't "open to new views."
I don't know how this happened but I learned how to think, therefore learn, for myself when I was around 13 years old...thank God my life went through what it needed to reach that end.
Now, when I'm not at school getting my *** flattened, I read in my bed, not just novels, biographies, scientific books. I also write my books, which involve a lot of research on several subjects. Including the ones I learn at school. I learn them in depth and apply what I know to my books, making funny and interesting situations with the characters. I learn with joy on my own. same cannot be said about school.
Since I spend my time doing this...I don't study for the tests and rarely pay attention(unless something catches my ear, which will be something that is of my interest) and since I don't study for tests, my answers aren't the "best" so I get penalized for not having the "knowledge required" and get a low grade at the end of the school year...when..in the "backstage" I'm already doing things that could be considered intelligent and pretty advanced fo rmy age.
Yet, with a bad grade, people think you're dumb for not realising that you need to know 48 quatrillion facts by the end of the school year.
The gradind system should be redone...not...change a bit here...a bit there...that's wrong. It only gets things worse.
You need to cut this by the root.
School also needs to aknowledge the work the students have outside of school, instead of just the stupid homelife evanding homework. They should get to know the kids better. the results schools should be waiting for would be diffrent views, practical work where knowledge is applied...isntead of just trianing your memory and getting a good general knowledge to talk in parties.

I know many students don't have any projects...all they care about is licking their partners' genitals and going to clubs and do "fun" things. But if from the begginig the kids were shown they could do what they wanted....without being so controlled...by the time they were teenagers they would have projects of their own....even try to get on the market with a young age.
Yet, society thinks that teenagers are too young and are going to ruin everything because all they care about is going home to masturbate and sleep. It's not a matter of chronological age...it's a matter of wether you're able to (and want/need to) take in the information or not.
Maybe they think about naked girls and smoke weed because they didnt' get the education needed....they were just schooled. Which is very diffrent.
I see guys fighting in the school grounds...kids taking guns to school because of their paranoid parents.. I see pregnant girls.....I see classmates putting their penises out of their pants behind an open school book and ejaculating on the anatomical figure of the female genitals.
And I wonder where Education is. I'm afraid school aren't about education anymore...it's about making you have good grades, because that suposdly sums up the intellectual capacity of a human being in development into a few numbers and letters. I then wonder who's the irresponsible lazy one in this situation. The government or the students?
Another thing that students actually learn, is how to cheat. They find themselves in tricky situations and you can see how intelligent they are..they LEARN how to di it well because they're IN SITUATION in real life Imagine if they put that effort in the things they liked.
Basically...this generation is already "ruined"...we would need to start a new education program as soon as the new 7 year olds got into school. they should also be allowed to make errors. "But errors occupy a lot fo time...so lets take them away from errors and make them learn fast." is their indirect argument.
It's like school builds bridges over entire cities the kids should explore. they build bridges just to put them at the top of the buildings right away. Kids grow with the feeling that Being at the top right away is the best way to go...because you have instant sucess.
I could make so many metaphors to try to make myself understood. It's the only way I do it. even in school...which is deviating behaviour for them, specially when writing essays.
I have so much to say...but I got a bad education when it came to "teach" me how to express myself.
Do you know how it feels to be uncomprehended and not being able to make yourself understood? It's horrible for a teenager who sees the world in a diffrent way...has theories about the universe.."tries" to write diffrent books..but isn't table to discuss it because he lacks argumentation skills. Socialisation would solve this...but you rarely have the time and mature people to develop it in school.
School should be a place where you learn the good things for life...instead of just concentrating in the jobs and monetary success.
School should concetrate on happiness reather than success.
It annoys me that most people see school as a daycare center for irresponsible parents, who also got a bad education, to leave their children for the day.

The system doens't just CHANGE because it'll become very unstable and very confusing...and obvisouly, nobody likes confusion. Specially the govenrment.
The only, almost utopic solution that I can come up with is to stop the schools for a year or two. Getting the system completly recreated re-organized, concepts like education, leanring re-defined. Having MODERN specialists backing up their actions and then beggining from a new starting point.
It's like today's educational system (not just in America) is this ladder that has been creaking for a long time. It creaks more everyday, and what the governement tries to do is to renovate one step of the ladder, change this or that nail. Because this requires less effort and money.
My inability to argument starts here...how to show people what I think.
I think a new ladder should be built. It could be built in the "backstage" and then changed like "Next year things will be completly diffrent".
Like...if they change a "nail" it's : "We have made grades more important. We have new requirments for teachers."
If they change the entire ladder, it's like :"The way we educate the new generations has completly changed." A new ladder has been built.
Obvisouly the money is not being spend in ladders..but in the tanks and bombs.

I agree with you (the original poster) on what you said. I would type more but I don't want to crash the internet with controversial theories and arguments.
And I'm only 17...God knows where I will be in 20 years.

Answer 2

We quit blaiming the education system and start teaching our kids morels BEFORE we send them off to school.

Why must teachers deal with children who don't want to learn?

Easiest fix?

Kick those kids out.

No child left behind?

I say education to those who actually want it!