Educational Reform

The country’s future depends upon properly educating its children, and we are not doing a very good job. While there have been many calls to improve our educational system, we have not yet succeeded. Here are a few modest proposals for such an improvement.

College has become too expensive for many otherwise qualified people. Our goal of equal opportunity is slipping away. Yet, a college education is more of a job requirement than ever. Every qualified student should be able to attend college.

The government should pay for college for anyone with good grades. In return, each student would commit to one year of public service for each year of college paid for. The overall program could be titled, “American Service Corps,” or ASC.

Early childhood is a time for children to learn by playing, but we subject them to discipline and passivity at ever earlier ages. We need pre-school and early school environments which allow children to follow their interests through play, well before imposing a rigid behavioral code on them. We need fun and opportunities for learning in the classroom, not more rigidity.

Elementary and High School structures tend to be lectures, but lectures are not efficient modes of learning. We think faster than we hear, meaning boredom and loss of attention are inevitable in lectures. Similarly, we learn more by doing than by sitting passively. We need to let go of the lecture as our prime teaching mechanism. Our school structures need to be more open to experimentation, and to more effective means of learning. The nation needs to begin wide-scale experimentation in alternatives to the current system.