Keeping Them : Does Anyone Win?

Have you considered a world where kids did not have to attend school? For decades it has been routine that that youth attend school and strive for excellence. But what if they could opt not to? Instead what would they do? Find a job or learn a trade?

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.

The article “If you send your kid to private school, you are a bad person” discusses how paying for private school instead of sending your kid to public school has an effect on the public school system. The author Allison Benedikt argues that if all parents sent their kids to public school it would slowly improve the school system for every other child that also has to attend. Benedikt develops the argument by using pathos and telling about her horrible public school experience she had growing up and how she wants it to be improved so all children get the same academic advantages as others.

Class after class, day after day, I often sense a massive amount of repetition with school. Each lesson feels more like a chore than an actual learning experience. That’s the way school has always been though, like a job. It is hard to note that there is any sort of progress being made in terms of the everyday learning experience. In his essay, Against School, educator John Taylor Gatto claims that the everyday boredom of school is truly meant to demoralize and dumb down students, destroying individuality and the ability to create independent and critical thinkers. Gatto explains how children are not really growing up, they are only getting older, indicating that public schools exist only to “cripple our kids.” By using his experience in the classroom, Gatto creates an element of pathos and develops a structure which almost fools readers into inferencing what his opinion truly is. Gatto ultimately, through these rhetorical devices, wants to ignite thoughts about what the true purpose of school is, displaying the modern day public school education as a factory to create a mindless population of students.

For students, almost everyday begins by attending school. There are some students who excel and some who do not. The problem that is now faced is that the students who do not excel in school, are being rewarded for something they have not earned. These students are being passed to the next grade, but have not learned the necessary material. If students are failing, they should be held back because they are not truly passing, it is unfair to other students, and consequences will be learned.

The education system as of now has no distinct reward system, leaving students by the end of the year, burned out for our efforts. The average student spends roughly an hour on homework every night. We balance oxidation reactions, solve for acceleration, and identify rhyme schemes, but at the end of the year, we are left with a single question– now what? We feel no purpose in the effort we put into assignments and tests. At Oak Grove High School especially, we have a phrase that I hear often, “attendance matters”. Many of us do not recognize the importance of attendance. Many of us ask why does attendance does matter. We get nothing from attendance other than a better learning

Forced learning acts can create rebellious and dull-minded children and teens. Laws around schooling are stricter than ever. Young children are starting to rebel against teachers and make destructive decisions. Students of all ages are beginning to ignore their teachers and not care about school. This leads to teachers feeling somewhat defeated and not trying to teach at the level that they should because the students lack of wanting to learn can reflect on how the teacher teaches especially with the switching of classes. As Jennifer Chassman wrote, “Teachers are expected to teach with students coming in and out of

The school, in theory, is set up to make the child succeed and learn new information. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, “21 percent judged student absenteeism

The teacher may illustrate the economic importance of belonging to a strong union by closing down the school before the child arrives.”(225) when I saw a 5th grade, my school was closing down and the debate wether attend one school so they can make more money. It put a lot of pressure on students and parents because they didn’t know where they child go.

As of 2017, attending school regularly was defined as ‘attending in accordance with the rules prescribed by the school’ and not sufficiently frequent attendance (The Supreme Court, 2017). By attending regularly, Corte suggested children would discover ‘the ability to apply meaningfully learned knowledge and skills, flexibly and creatively in different situations’ (2010, p.45). Peters supports a similar ideology, whereby education allows children to ‘link concepts in order to gain a wider understanding of the world’ (1966). Both of these views suggest that by attending regularly, children will learn meaningful knowledge and

‘Don’t stay in school,’ is the aggressive statement that some extremists declare. Recently, portions of the masses have been onset to convey their interpretation of the school system and the various flaws that are persisting. Personally, whether it be taking into account stories that were confessed by other students about the system, or experiencing these issues from being immersed in them, I’m gradually getting a grasp on their goals for ‘fixing’ education. For the most part, I would have to concur with these concerned individuals. I would not go as far to assert the idea of absolutely dropping out, although I can recognize the issues and have concepts to help resolve them. From experience, I can sympathise with students and majors that are gradually discovering that many classes that are drilled into our heads year after year aren’t a necessity, that having a broader set of classes at an early age are an urgency, and that you truly aren’t educated on how to handle many financial and social issues in the real world.

From a historical perspective, compulsory public education is a relatively new concept. Prior to establishing public schools, education was reserved for the privileged elite thought to have an innate predisposition for learning. (Office of Education, 1965; Hazlet, 2011, Iorio, 2011, p3, Comer, 1996)

Every year it becomes more apparent that students are not being adequately prepared for society. There is an inverse relationship between the importance of education and the way the United States education system works. If high schoolers were thrown into the real world they would unquestionably not be prepared. High school students are learning to prepare for their next geometry test. Students are preparing to get an A on their test, and then most of the time, the information learned is forgotten. Lasting knowledge isn’t created by learning how to get an exceptional grade on a test or filling out worksheets upon worksheets. In the real world, you don’t succeed by getting A’s on tests and completing a packet on a science experiment. It’s immensely more than that, which is not being taught at high schools. Leon Botstein writes an essay proposing that in order to fix the problem of American High schools, that the American High School should be abolished. He states that graduation should come earlier. I support Botstein’s claim that high schools are obsolete and that graduation should come sooner for the reason that, students aren’t given the opportunity to understand what the real world is like behind the walls of a high school.

Education is a important thing in the lives of all children, so that they may grow up to lead good jobs, and make enough money to support themselves and their family. This is why Education is so important to Birthday Parties, this is why we believe that all children should have well funded schools to be educated in, so that students will be able to do things in school that rewire a higher budget, like have computers for every student, or expanding or renovating old school grounds. Since education is so important to the lives of children, our party believes that the government should not change the laws around mandatory school attendance. This is because education is very important to children; But if children are not getting educated because they didn’t have to go to school because it they didn’t want to, then how will they fair later in life? Where people are only really willing to hire people with High School education levels, but since these children did not get the education that was provided, then they might have to get jobs

Absenteeism has impacted over six million students, that’ve missed 15 or more days in 2013-2014, that adds up to 14 percent of the student’s population. Many components can add to students missing classes, for example: Family wellbeing or money related concerns, poor school atmosphere, medication and liquor utilize, transportation issues, and contrasting group dispositions towards training are among the conditions that are regularly connected with a youngster's continuous nonappearance from school according to LaTra Tracy Rogers (2011). It can also be impacted by absence of group bolster, an unsupportive school condition, jumbled family life, nasty climate, individual shortfalls, and weakness.