My Position on Education Reform

My Position on Education Reform

A foundation for my research essay on American education reform. This essay lays out the main ideas of what, why, and how we can better educate todays youth.

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Obtaining knowledge is by far one of the most defining human desires and is a novel characteristic of our species. Why, then, do so many of America's schools fail to give our youth the basic understanding of neither the world nor of our own country? We need to update not only what we teach our youth but also how we teach them.

Needless to say our country isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean we need to remain ignorant. In a recent street survey, persons selected at random were asked to point to various countries on a global map, such as France, Australia, India, etc. While this may seem like an easy feat, nearly all the participants failed to correctly identify where each of these countries were actually located – and we have no one else to blame but ourselves. If these people had been taught the importance of being a world citizen they would be better equipped to understand and handle the problems we face as a planet and as a nation.

Speaking as a member of this nation I cannot say I am proud of how things are being run; our government purposely keeps the general public ignorant to devoid them of their inherent political power and fails to acknowledge the severity of our national debt crisis. The education system should, starting from primary school, incorporate a unit based on economic and government policy. This does not mean spoon-feeding information about positions of officials or dollar statistics into the minds of our students, but rather lay out the foundation for basic monetary principles. These courses would provide our youth with the groundwork for understanding concepts such as debt, deficits, earning and spending so that when they reach adulthood they know how to effectively and constructively use money for themselves and their communities.

Incorporating a unit on domestic and world politics would also be essential; what governments do, different types pf government and how they are run, and how government affect our lives. The more a population understands their government the more they can make informed decisions that affect not only our own citizens but how we perform as a nation on a global scale.

Along with understanding the fiscal and official side of society, I think we fail as a whole to provide the population with an educated concept of sex and coitus. There are more and more teen pregnancies and abortions, which in turn create more and more people, more debt, more disease and perpetuating more shameful ideals. Many parents feel unconformable conducting on open sexual discourse with their child; this leaves that child with a taboo sense of sexuality and open to make any wild interpretations about sex he or she may form in the open world. Would it not be better to formally educate our people about the biological necessity and risks that come with sex, rather than leaving them uninformed over something so natural and in reality, beautiful?

Even these few curricular changes would no doubt come at a large cost, so where would the necessary funds come from? The fact that this question even exists is somewhat appalling; how do we not have the funds to provide each and every one