Academia

I often wonder if what we are teaching in school is really going to help our students. I recently read some research that indicated that the only thing affecting a students future is the people that they are surrounded by. The education they received had little or no effect on their futures. Could this actually be true? I cannot imagine that the schooling system that has been around for hundreds of years can be deemed utterly ineffective, it just doesn't make sense.

While taking a grad curriculum course I am painfully aware of the curriculum, its development and philosophy. There is a large amount of time, money and people hours spent on developing a curriculum that is effective and provides students with what they need. How can the brightest of the bright be rendered useless? I try and teach in a manner that will give students some sort of tools that will help them in the rest of their academic careers and maybe, just maybe, in their lives outside of school. Web tools are my major focus this year and I am pushing it hard in all classes that I teach. My hope is that one student will use prezi,twitter or wallwisher for another assignment in the next couple of years. There has to be an end result that we are all working towards, an achievable goal.

School is supposed to be the equalizer in a world of bad breaks and missed opportunities. If this equalizer is taken away, how will kids ever get out of poverty, how will they raise self supporting children contributing to the economy? It worries me that people outside of the education world value school so little. Life experience will teach a student skills, but what if those life experiences are horrible or frightening? In my mind, education is the basis for everything. How can it be any other way?

Once a geek...