Do Not Learn as a Machine

The paper aims at addressing education challenges, and illustrating the strategies required in addressing the challenges. Education is a basic need for every human being. It is necessary to obtain knowledge for one to survive in the world. However, obtaining education is not as easy as it is. For some, it is even harder to obtain education than to succeed in school. This article tries to explore the reasons why many people in the society around us either do not go to school or have dropped out of school by exploring some literary articles.

Getting an education is the main goal for everyone, although it is easy to obtain there are some obstacles to it. One of the main obstacles students face at the beginning of their education is standardized tests. Schools have started to adopt this type of tests as their main way to evaluate students’ intelligence and teachers’ effectiveness to educate the students. The way students used to learn has changed, in order to get them ready for the tests they have to spend much of the school time preparing for it instead of learning something they can use in their future life. According to Bruce Jacobs in No Child Left Behind's Emphasis on 'Teaching to the Test' Undermines Quality Teaching, a 2007 study by the University of Maryland teachers were put in much pressure and had thoughts to teach the test […]. This shows that teachers have also been affected by standardized tests in a way they have more pressure to make students pass. Having teachers ‘teach the test’ means their way to educate has been corrupted. In most cases when teachers’ ability to educate has been changed leads them to practice methods not convenient for scholars. One of these methods is memorization, in Relying on High-Stakes Standardized Tests to Evaluate Schools and Teachers: A Bad Idea by Hani Morgan describes how students start to adapt to an “inferior type of learning, based on memorization and recall students gain when teachers

Multiple students and teachers go to school every day and work very hard to meet the task that is asked of each of them each day. Teachers work more than 40 hours a week, especially when events go on throughout the school year. Students go to class to earn the grade of an “A,” not to learn what the teacher is teaching the class due to the fact that students were taught to consistently earn a letter grade in the class. However, teachers are not at fault either, because the school board and administrators give teachers a timeline for the curriculum. The students must learn a certain amount in a specific amount of time in each marking period. In “Against School” by John Taylor Gatto, he describes how many students and teachers go to school the atmosphere is dull, due to the fact that the education system has been so fixed in the American public school. Gatto questions whether schooling is even a necessity for the children of America. The failure in the American education system has flaws, that are reflected by immaturity and boredom in students caused by their treatment under the system, timeline for curriculum, and the amount of time spent in the classroom.

In addition, schools are like assemblies that are require to follow procedures. Assemblies follow ideas or rules to have organize the people, for this reason schools due the same thing. However, those who don’t follow the procedures would show a low progress in class. For example, in the article “Kid, I’m sorry, but You’re Just Not College Material” by Michael J. Petrilli shows how students perform low in their academics’ level, and instead they decide to work because its less challengeable. As a result, not every college student is capable of attending and graduation from college because of their education level. However, everything leads back to when the college students were children. Their academic preface in college show a negative path

Standardized tests take away the creativity from the teachers forcing them to "teach to the test" this means memorizing

Education gives common people the means to turning dreams into reality. Education allows common people to open up their minds to various possibilities, that will arise from becoming educated. But, yet there are times where our education systems do not uphold student/learners to a high norm. Although, problems with education systems rarely occur, inadequate performance in school can be feasible if there are issues within the child’s household. Nonetheless, students who face inconsistent dilemmas, fail since they attempt to solve both problems.

In order to, actually learn a person has to fully grasp a subject to comprehend it. The third author, Kyoko Mori, author of the essay School,  declaims that, “No matter what the subject, our teachers never gave us very clear advice about how to do it better” (Mori 206). Most people would agree with that statement, not just because of the truth behind it, but from personal experiences where that certain statement has been applied before. It could be math, english, science, history, art, sports, music, or anything under the sun that could possibly be learned, where the teacher of that particular subject may explain something where it all sounds familiar; it could be on the top on someone’s mind and they just wouldn’t quite be able to get it, because of the way the teacher explained it. Most people have figured out that most things, if they want to be successful with it, they have to do it themselves to know if they did it right or not.

Education should not only be looked at as attending college and passing exams to succeed in school. It should be seen more as the complete development of one's personality, intellectual development, and moral evolution. The system tells everyone to learn the same material, even if the students are bored and even if they’re sleeping during class. In the article “Against School”, John Taylor Gatto states, “teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subject and clearly weren’t interested in learning” (Gatto). This shows the teachers and the students disconnect from the context because either it’s irrelevant or not being taught in inspiring ways.

Education in America has drastically decreased in efficiency in the last fifty years. Schools in America do not care about their students, or their education; they care about the test scores achieved by their students. The American education system is severely flawed in many ways. These flaws are more dire than they are made out to be, since they incapacitate the ability of their students to learn the material taught. This occurs because it is more important to pass a class than to retain the information they obtain.

Instead of coming together to create a truly democratic society that supports the whole we are caught up in serving first our own interests followed by the interests of the system that has allowed us to succeed. How is it possible that the people making the decisions can look at the state of our education system and blame the teachers for failing when they are also the ones providing the strict standards that serve to perpetuate the current hegemonic society we live in? I do think that there are good parts of having certain standards for education – all students should know how to read and write, everyone should have a basic understanding of mathematical concepts and history – but I think by micromanaging classrooms across the country, teachers are prevented from doing their job of teaching students and instead being tasked with “filling up the knowledge bank” with information deemed important by individuals and groups who have little to no connection to actual classrooms. The main point of this chapter was to shine a light on the negatives of the traditional education system and explain the educational philosophy aimed at combating the perpetuation of such

But when a child is reared in a nurturing and loving environment they can blossom into a free thinking questioning intelligent human being. Another article that uses these ideas to explore the problems with rigid top-down cultures is Paulo Freire’s “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”. In this article, Paulo Freire describes two main concepts relating to how the education system functions, one which is the current problem, and one that is his proposed solution. The problematic system is called the banking concept of education. Freire explains, “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.” With this he is explaining how within the banking system teachers are the ones with all the knowledge and are of a higher power than the students, so the teachers give everything to the students and the students give nothing to the teacher. This is because the students are described as simply being responsible to absorb what the teacher has to teach them. This is due to the fact that it is believed that it is not possible for them to comprehend anything the teacher does not already understand because that would be too

There is this idea of how if the teacher’s students do great on the test it means that they are great teachers, which is not necessarily the case. Columbia University states, “Standardized testing causes many teachers to only “teach to the tests,”. This practice can hinder a student’s overall learning potential. With the stakes getting higher and higher for teachers, this practice will only continue to increase. The sad reality is that it fosters an atmosphere that is boring and lacks creativeness. Teachers have such pressure to get their students ready for these exams that they neglect to teach students skills that go beyond the tests.” With the lack of teachers actually using their skills to teach the curriculum and the only thing they teach is how to take tests, school will not be where students would want to learn, and they will eventually drop out in the future. Also teaching tests will not help students in life in any way, especially without the teacher and student

Stated in the article, some teachers see a huge increase with students showing improvement and try to learn to their full potential. In a school setting, students and teachers judge the success based on their understanding, processing, and remembering the information. This can lead to effectiveness by the teacher, students, and anyone who is observing. Also, it can lead to conclusion where the students have made a progress in a particular lesson and can remember no much of the information at a later time. In some cases, recalling information can be harder to improve which can lead to better

Both authors touch upon how students today are required to learn material just for the sake of taking a test. Therefore, they usually regurgitate material for the exam yet there is no retention or interest in what they are learning especially in the core subjects. This places pressure on the teachers to alter their curriculum to fit the needs of the test. I believe that this not only narrows the range of learning but crushes the creativity in the classroom both with the teachers and the students. We as teachers and administrators are then evaluated and held accountable for these test scores which can be tied into a myriad of rewards or penalties depending on the outcomes. “Test scores are used to determine punishments (such as sanctions, penalties, funding reductions, negative publicity), accolades (awards, public celebration, positive publicity), advancement (grade promotion or graduation for students), or compensation (salary increases or bonuses for

Schools are and will forever be learning institutions, but learning isn’t limited to purely comprehension and fact memorization that can be found in books. Furthermore, knowledge is an unquantifiable metric and similarly, grades and scores have a multitude of factors that could affect the results. This is not to devalue good academic standing but rather raising a question of “Do we want to develop students holistically or