Revitalizing Education: Unveiling the Hidden Challenges and Opportunities in the U.S. Public Education System

Exploring the advantages of education reform has been one of the most interesting thought exercises of my life. As a child, going through the public education system, I rarely thought about the highlights and disadvantages of my education. I think that’s notable because my school system had resources that many schools, probably most public schools didn't have; it wasn't obvious to me, while I was in school, that I had an advantage that a large percentage of the population wouldn’t have. I suppose to some respect I acknowledged it, but I wouldn’t realize how daunting the situation was until at least college. As an adult, I started listening to the way that people would talk about our public education system; and hearing that no one has faith in the system and considering that everyone went through it (one way or another), was enlightening and alarming the way we approach education in the United States.

I have a traveler’s heart, and lived in several States after college, which exposed me to opportunities to gather insight throughout the states, and regionally, across the country. Consequently, I have dedicated thought, study, and time to the practice of education and have come to understand our system to be needlessly broken, which I find both fascinating and remarkably frustrating. In part because, the United States education system has undergone some adjustments since its beginning that only reflect several decades worth of societal changes, economic shifts and movements, and technological advances, but that rarely reflect the benefits of education for education; preparing and guiding a student with an attitude of mindful development to provide sensible direction. I can’t help but wonder, what do we think the purpose of education is? And why does the public education system continue to wrestle with education reformists? With this essay, I wanted to explore the history of the United States education system, the decline of arts education, and the ongoing efforts toward education reform.

            The roots of the United States education system can be traced back to colonial times, the quality and subject matter varied greatly, although most schools had a strong emphasis on religious instruction and basic literacy. As the nation expanded, so did the interest in a more formalized education structure. The 19^th century witnessed the rise of the common, and existing school movement, spearheaded by Horace Mann. This movement aimed to provide free, universal education to all children, and that fostered a sense of civic responsibility and social cohesion. It's interesting to think that the foremost development of our contemporary education system is that there is one. Since the early 19^th century, the most notable evolution of our system is that schools have been socially integrated and that private and charter schools have since been established.

The early universal public education system was primarily geared toward agricultural needs, and that meant that most children were leaving school to help with familial demands, and with somewhere between only a fifth and eighth-grade education. The Industrial Revolution prompted a shift solely allowing more children to see their education through to high school. However, we wouldn’t see a change in how we educated our children throughout the 20^th century. The federal government would take more of an active role in our education after the Department of Education in 1979, further centralizing federal influence regarding education policies. Along with this development, the country saw a more active public interest in education; including but not limited to disparities in educational quality and access, and a systemic approach to objective learning, which would only narrow the importance of some school subjects over others.

A growing mindset throughout the United States began to challenge the notions of subjective experience, passionate self-expression, and personal growth as immeasurable and therefore irrational and romanticized. An irony is that it was the growing popularity of science fiction in the 1950s (along with our response to Soviet scientific advances) that is partially, and reactively responsible for our overly-methodical approach not only to education but also to our contemporary way of living. One notable consequence of our more systematic lifestyle is the inflexible focus of STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), and an introduction to standardized testing.

An increasing interest in our education system paved the way for education reform. Education reformers began advocating for a renewed emphasis on the arts as an integral component of a well-rounded education, shifting away from a one-size-fits-all approach, emphasizing the need for personalized, student-centered learning, issues in education equality, standardized and high-stakes testing, a lack of vocational opportunities in schools, an overemphasis on grades, and teacher quality and professional development. Reform strategies included: increasing funding for schools (especially in underserved areas), professional development for educators, and incorporating diverse perspectives to create a more inclusive and culturally responsive education environment.

            In the early years of our public education system, the arts had a more active role in our schools’ curricula. Educators recognized the value in fostering creativity and critical thinking via the arts, along with—and I would suggest in cooperation with—history and the sciences. The claim that science and history courses provide a more proposed if not superior education to the art is arbitrary at best and has only provided the blueprint for an aimless and limited standard. What objective or destination that shapes the STEM curricula is more beneficial to our lives than the arts? If the endgame is to produce empiricists and college professors alone then I withdraw my conclusions, however… that’s not the case. This suggests that we are clueless about how human behavior, emotion, and intelligence progress and evolve throughout our experience, shaping, interweaving, and blending with our nervous systems, and who we become individually and culturally.

The decline of arts education has much broader implications for students and society, beyond the risks of stifling the qualities vital for innovation and success in our increasingly complex world. Not only depriving students of a comprehensive learning experience but also hampering a student’s aptitude for learning, and how we process our life experience. Students who lack access to arts education miss out on opportunities to understand and develop self-expression and personal growth, hindering their ability to live dynamic lives, let alone to succeed. Studies have shown a correlation between arts education and academic achievement, improved problem-solving skills, and enhanced cognitive development.

There are far more people than not who explore their life experience through an inspired lens, learning about history and the sciences more thoroughly, and with more satisfaction and mastery when taught in collaboration with the arts. It’s fascinating that people think about self-expression and personal growth as meaningless platitudes, reducing our life experience to little more than replicable data and methods. We are genuinely razing the very fabric of what makes us human, with evolving AI and devolving humanity, we’re going to cancel our ability to recognize beauty let alone our capability to express it.

When discussing education reform one of the most notable and reiterated ideas is to revise the one-size-fits-all approach to learning. General-purpose learning serves only the bad idea that the government needs to record and regulate education. However, “learning disabilities” aside, not every child gathers, retains, or processes information in the same way, and knowing an answer and recovering the information or finding the confidence to recover comprehended information are very different things. The point is that there are layers upon layers of reasons why a one-size-fits-all approach to education does not work. And why standardized learning is a substandard approach to learning and standardized testing is a substandard approach to test. This is to say that everything we are doing is bad, and yet general-purpose learning/testing is the baseline of our education system and has been since the mid-1800s.

Many reformers lean toward a personalized, student-centered learning approach as an alternative. So, what is personalized, student-centered learning? Well, essentially, it’s the idea that student interest drives education, allowing students to decide what they learn and how they learn it. I don’t know, I think that there are unusual and adverse universal characteristics among people that severely restrict our ability to develop genuine, sustainable social practices toward progress. When faced with the amending or the upgrading of an idea (for example), we tend to focus on the first seemingly rational alternative—which is also usually the most contrary to the point—and then we over-rationalize the alternative idea’s competence, and then focus on the probable arguments. The best alternative to a general-purpose, standardized education system is not a personalized, student-centered learning approach. There are benefits to partial universal curriculum-based learning.

Understanding the purpose of- and how to read the periodic table of elements, for example, although most of us may never need the information—like knowing different systems of measurement—there is some dormant information that emerges ubiquitous, and when adapted to and in collaboration with other information can and will have indispensable benefits (people aren’t simple math equations, our emotions, and even our intellect, are interwoven and in collaboration with every other bio-system within us. Reducing us to the methods of a declared effect resulting from a specified cause is ridiculous, and so is teaching that way). Historical events and universal concepts provide valuable foundations and insights into our present and forthcoming lives. We need to be better about how we teach universal information at what age, and how we incorporate information into learning, and understanding that how we learn is conditionally to the discovery of our passions.

Providing personalized, student-centered learning won't be as prudent as providing schools with diverse resources that allow students to flourish in limited structured, independent learning environments. Here’s the information, now it’s my job as the teacher to guide you to figure out how to learn this information, and therefore how to best continue to learn throughout your life. When schools make information and opportunities available in structured learning environments the applications can be horizonless, including making in-school vocational programs available for all middle and high school students. There is no reason classes shouldn’t be made available for food prep and cooking, management, mechanic, and machine, electrical, plumbing, business administration, dental hygienist, paralegal, carpentry, and others (for example); high schools are too focused on prepping for college and not for life. As well as in-school opportunities for social and emotional learning (SEL).

I've thought a lot about how schools emphasize grades in the learning environment. Grades are made to establish a baseline to regulate what and how much information is retained. However, that is not the role that grades ultimately play throughout our lives. There are far more harmful repercussions to our public schools’ emphasis on grades than there are beneficial. With the obvious exception of moralities associated with this ideology, grades condition students to over-evaluate their mistakes, and to label them as either “you’re right” or “you’re wrong.” And not only you’re right and you’re wrong, but “you’re good,” and “you’re bad,” which will influence how we come to distinguish between any number of things throughout our lives: the inability to do anything “right,” the labeling of our emotions as positive or negative, making a mistake at work (or in life) and questioning our decisions and opinions (for example).

We shouldn’t be viewing our world through the lens of you’re right and wrong, but rather impartial experience. Grades teach us that there are always wrong answers and approaches to problem-solving, and they teach us to be afraid of making mistakes. Of course, the obvious irony here is that we have all also heard, especially as adults, that we learn by making mistakes; so, we spend the first, and most impressionable eighteen years of our lives, learning to be afraid of making mistakes, and then the next sixty years trying to unlearn a government regulated educational-based conditioned internal conflict that requires real conscious amending to overcome so we feel at least “OK,” about making mistakes. We’re treating our humanity too much like a game of Jenga.

            The greatest threat to education reform, as well as the reform opponent's favorite thoughtless soundbite, is the monstrously absurd position of allocated funding. How to pay for education reform: the arts, shifts toward immersive learning, including middle and high school-based vocational programs, shifted emphasis on grades, teacher quality, and living wage? The idea that comprehensive education throughout the United States is limited to increased taxpayers’ dollars is outrageous. We don’t need to increase taxpayer dollars to provide a comprehensive education for everyone. We need to reallocate taxpayer dollars. The money is already there, it's just in the wrong place (see, yes, some things are “wrong,” we just need to be more careful about how we think about them).

Reallocating funds toward education is so obvious it’s frustrating, because if we don’t invest wholly in our education there’s no point in investing in anything, is there? Otherwise, we’re investing in failure; we are currently investing in failure. Schools being positioned to manage consistently reduced budgets is the wrong and needless position for schools. The best alternative is for the government to provide schools with the funding necessary to make all our programs and opportunities available. The United States is spending more on defense than education, when you consider that we spend almost three times more in defense than the ensuing country (and fifteen times more than the ensuing subsequent), the reallocation of federal funds for education should be pretty f$&king straightforward. And that’s just defense spending. The federal government allocates spending for:

·         Social Security,  ·  National Defense,  ·  “Health,”  ·  “Net Interest,”   ·  Medicare,   ·  Income Security (Welfare),  ·  and Veterans Benefits and Services.

And all at higher percentages than our education (perhaps we can reallocate a little from each). Any administration that doesn’t audit government spending and the allocation of taxpayer dollars at the beginning of their term is behaving irresponsibly. ^[1]The United States Government Accountability Office (GOA) has been auditing our government’s “consolidated financial statements, since” since ’97, however, GOA has been “unable to render an audit opinion on the government’s accrual-based consolidated financial statements,” due to:

·         “Serious Financial Management Problems at the Department of Defense; (National Defense)”

·         “The federal government’s inability to adequately account for intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies;”

·         …and (and my favorite) “Weaknesses in the federal government’s process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.”

I like the third point in particular because the reason for the office of GOA’s audit is to manage the consolidated financial statements. The federal government’s unwillingness to reallocate funds to improve our education system validates any claim that somewhere between the government’s indifference and our own, we’re just waiting to become obsolete. At the peak of our success as a nation, at the very least, the arts were a recognized and significant element of our education system. I can’t say that I’m surprised that after decades of reduced art programs, we’re experiencing severe national shortcomings: social polarity and divisiveness, economic anxieties, and waves of mental unsoundness. We have to do better, and fortunately, I think I might know a good place to start.

            As the United States education system stands at a crossroads the path forward is so obvious it feels disrespectful. It's our responsibility to demand a comprehensive and innovative approach to learning. Reimagining our public education system requires we restore arts education and address issues that allow for education inequalities. Policy changes, a reallocation of funds, and most importantly a commitment to valuing diverse forms of intelligence and creativity, are essential elements for successful reform. Moreover, fostering collaboration between educators, students, policymakers, and the community, is crucial to creating a sustainable and adaptable public education system that meets the evolving needs of students and prepares them for the challenges of the future. And of course, I have a lot more to say on the subject, and in greater detail, so keep your eyes open for future essays on education!

^[1] U.S. Government Accountability Office, https://www.gao.gov/federal-financial-accountability