Today's Flawed Education System

When I was growing up, I always knew my mother knew much more about the world than other adults I knew did. I was never sure exactly why or how she knew so much, but she did. I oftentimes thought it was just because she was a teacher, but I've come to realize that wasn't the case. As I've grown older, I've discovered that yes - being a teacher does have a lot to do with her wisdom, but it's moreso how she teaches that makes her wise. My mom sees her role in education as an opportunity to teach children how to live therr lives rather than as an opportunity for them to recite information from memory. After reading Paulo Friere's The "Banking" Concept of Education, I am confident that my mother not only knows some things that other adults don't, but she knows some things that the state governments don't seem to know about education.

She taught my brother and me so many things about life in ways that challenged our thinking. Sure, we go to school and learn in ways that make the teachers feel they are superior; yet, at home, everything we learn about life, love and happiness is taught to us through real life situations that we can apply to our lives. It wasn't until recently that I learned both of these approaches to education have names. At school, we are typically taught through a method called "Banking." Using this approach teachers essentially, "fill" our brains with knowledge, and the more they "fill" our brains, the better teachers they are (Freire257). The opposite of this, how my mother teaches in her classroom, is called "Problem-Posing". The point of problem posing education is to face students with situations that challenge them to expand their thinking, rather than just regurgitating information on a standardized test.

My mother, Sandy Stambaugh, has been a teacher in the North Canton City School district for 28 years. Teaching first grade for six years, and then moving up to the middle school level, she has taught many different classes for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. She plans to continue to teach for many more years. The other night, I took some time after dinner to sit down and talk with her about the education system. She had many interesting points that coincided with Friere's views. "I agree that the banking system exits and that it is ineffective. However, for the problem posing system to work, teachers need to be trained accordingly," Stambaugh says. Many teachers don't know how to teach the problem posing approach in their classrooms; it's a foreign concept to them. Without giving them some information to "bank," they have nothing to apply to their lives. Stambaugh recognizes that students do need to "bank" knowledge. However, her approach requires them to discover that knowledge and then integrate and evaluate it.

Our education system does not account for the different types of students we have. Figure One is a stellar example of this. The teacher in this comic is clearly proctoring a standardized test. Our standardized tests require the same skills for everyone, much like the task of climbing a tree in the comic. Just as some animals are incapable of climbing a tree, some students are incapable of the skills on a standardized test. Some students may have test anxiety, some may not do well when they're being timed, some may not be able to read fast enough to get through all of the questions... The list goes on and on, illustrating how unfair our educational system can be. It is unrealistic for us to expect students of all different types to do well on the same exact test. Stambaugh feels that standardized testing may imply that learning has a starting and a stopping place, which she believes is not true. "Testing learning in a given subject, on a given day, in a given place, and at a given time implies that it occurs in isolation - independent of all else." In her opinion, the banking system fails to acknowledge that learning is interdisciplinary and ongoing.

When Stambaugh was asked about her feelings towards standardized testing, she responded by saying "Those who support standardized testing have good intentions. It's the government's way of holding students and teachers accountable." Unfortunately, these tests rarely measure what the students are learning; instead, they tend to measure how much information students have banked." This goes back to the concept of changing the entire educational system. In order to change it, we would have to change the way we measure our students' success. "When education is done right, standardized tests are not necessary. The evidence of student learning presents itself in authentic ways. Highly motivated, willingly engaged , and consistently performing students are a clearly identifiable result," Stambaugh said later on during our discussion.

The main focus of school districts today is to be sure that their ratings are top of the line. Figure Two is an example of this. The smaller aspects of the pie chart are life-impacting actions. Instead of worrying about the actions and decisions students might be making outside of school, most administrations are more concerned about how their stidents do on state tests. The top of the line rating aspirations that all schools have require teachers be sure that their students are preapred to score on-level or above on their standardized testing. These teachers do not have much leeway in what they must teach. It's very hard to teach in a problem posing manner with what small amount of leeway they have. "I have mastered taking tests, and that's about it," Kaitlin Kaminski says in her article in the Huffington Post, "If you ask me how to write a check or pay for college, I couldn't even tell you where to start."

The entire concept of state guidelines and standards restrict our teachers from teaching with the problem posing approach. "State standards are stifling. Guidelines are not conducive to problem posing methods," Stambaugh claims. Once the teaching methods are changed, students will exceed state standards. In order for this to happen, our teachers must be trained to teach problem posing education. The education system that is currently in place has been used for so many years, which would make it very difficult to change. Despite the difficulty, Stambaugh agrees that something need to change. Our middle school and high school students have been taught through "banking" for so long, that they are already oppressed and would most likely have a difficult time adjusting to a new method. After the initial difficulty, there would be a major boots in the children's education. They would be engaged, active and interested. Change is hard, but change is good.

Education "consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information" (Friere 262). In order to actually learn things, we must get out of the habit of just memorizing, reciting, and then transferring information from our memory onto the paper that a teacher will then grade for correctness. Education today is not measured by how well we actually learn things, but rather on how well we can remember information for a test. If we can transfer the information onto paper correctly, then we are considered "smart."

In order for children to be able to discover who they are and why they are who they are, they must learn through problem posing rather than banking. Learning through problem posing education allows our students to discover themselves. Frieire says in his essay that, "In problem posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves" (264). When students take information and apply it to their own lives, that's when "they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation" (Friere 264). The transformation they are seeing is when their education goes from regurgitating information to applying information to form life skills. They are becoming knowledgable humans rather than useless robots that can memorize a few definitions and dates. Problem posing education is the foundation to a successful adult life.

In her article, Has the American Education System Failed Today's Students? Kaminski gives a student's perspective of what our education system has become. Kaminski says she doesn't feel prepared for the real world. Her school has "taught [her] that [she] should be good at taking tests and nothing more." Being a current student, I can agree with what she has to say. Being around other students during the day, there are many instances when I've heard kids say, "When am I going to use this?" and teachers come back with a comment like "You wouldn't understand," or, "trust me, you'll need it one day." But like Kaminski says, "Did we? No!" Kaminski and myself are just two of millions of students all over America that feel like we aren't being prepared for life, but rather for a life full of test-taking. If that's all life was, then yes, we'd be prepared. My high school did not teach me to pay taxes, or take out a loan, or even, like Kaminski states, write a check. It's a foreign concept to many high schoolers because teachers are so focused on "banking" algebraic equations and scientific theories into our heads.

If we had a universal problem posing education system, our students would be so much more prepared and educated. You could kill so many birds with one stone; students would have common sense as well as knowledge from school textbooks and websites. There would be a balance in the things that they are learning, and everything they learn would have a purpose and could be applied to their lives. Education is meant to benefit students, not hold them back from reaching their full potential. By feeding them information and having them recite it back, our students are not able to reach their full potential. When posed with a problem, they can solve it creatively, discovering themselves and learning at the same time. Today's students are the future of our country, at the very least, they deserve an education that actually educates.

This article was written for my College Writing 2 class in 2015.

Works Cited

Freire Paulo. "The Banking Concept of Education." Ways of reading: An Anthology for Writers.

Ed. David Bartholomae, Anthony Petrosky. Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005. 257-267. Print.

Kaminski, Kaitlyn. "Has the American Education System Failed Today's Students?" The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 24 Apr. 2014. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.

Stambaugh, Sandy J. "Today's Education System." Interview by Shannon A. Stambaugh. 9 Mar 2015.

The Educational System Comic. Digital Image. weknowmemes.com. 10 Mar 2015.

What Schools Worry About. Digital image. The Red Clay Report. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.