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Persuasive Speech On Education In Education

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Ask any highschool student what the powerhouse of the cell is, they’ll reply “Mitochondria,” without processing the question. Ask what slope intercept form is… “y=mx+b”. High Schoolers will be able to tell you the precise structure of an atom, or the names of all three ships Columbus sailed on in his exploration. Ask them why they have a social security number? What a credit score is? Or, how do you do taxes or apply for a loan? And they will stare at you in a blind gaze. If we take a step back and think of what we really learned in four years of high school… what does it amount to? What does a good education look like? Why are we questioned what number/percentage we received instead of what did we learn? Education today prioritizes what scores we receive instead of what we have actually taken away from the work, and fails to provide us with the most basic life skills that we need to succeed. Our lives depend and revolve around the education we receive between the ages 5 and 18. Our system has set us up for failure from the earliest years. As stated in the earlier paragraph… it ranks our grades superior to what we have absorbed from the information we are given. Teachers will often administer busy work or grade for participation, though it may be beneficial to the students grade or easier for the teacher to grade... This method of teaching, too commonly practiced, sets the child up for failure when they go to take a final or standardized test and haven't truly learned the information. In Diane Ravitch’s piece, “On Her favorite Teacher,” she talks about how a teacher impacted her life with her teaching style, “Clearly she had multiple goals for her students, beyond teaching literature and grammar. She also was teaching about character and responsibility. These are not the sorts of things that appear on any standardized test.” These types of teachers that implement life lessons into educational ones and that put more emphasis on educating us than just simply letting students pass the class are teachers that lack in today's classroom. Learning mathematics, history, science, and English are of course necessary, but the system also fails to teach us the fundamentals it takes to become a functioning adult. In

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