Give Me Education or Give Me Death!

This is something that I wrote half an hour ago for the newspaper...it doesn't have EVERYTHING I think about education...but yeah..it's a piece of writing whatever..

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Give Me Education or Give Me Death!
By Xinyi Lin

Recalling from personal experience, it seems that everyone has something to complain about the American education system: “students nowadays are only concerned with pop culture,” “we need to have better teachers,” and “the education system is too test-oriented.” More than once have I heard people comment that the American high school graduates are underperforming in colleges and the students from our public schooling system are far behind in academics than those from other nations, namely China, Korea, and Japan. I am not here to refute or affirm any of these specific assertions. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just skip the cause(s) and jump to the conclusion that our education system is not perfect.

The presence of a problem obviously calls for a solution. Although the problem with our education (that I purposefully skipped) is numerous and diverse, there seems to exist a tendency in the reactions of the leaders of the nation: from Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy to Obama’s Race to the Top, these education “reforms” all place an heavy emphasis on measuring student performance in standardized tests. Recently, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, says that she will urge her members to adopt a form of teacher evaluation partly based on students’ achievement on standardized tests. HOLD ON! Are we looking for a magical cure for a problem far too complex? Has the “administration” run out of imaginative ideas so that the only thing it can think of is to demote students to numbers? To demote education to statistics?

Well, if education is not statistics then what is it? I believe that education is an unending process toward achieving enlightenment. It is not merely the procurement of knowledge (let alone getting an A on math tests) although knowledge is probably necessary to most human beings engaged in this process. In those rare occasions during schooldays when I remotely feel I am being educated, my entire world seems to open up, revealing a vast, unexplored terrain of thoughts to which I so eagerly embrace. This type of feeling usually doesn’t surface at all during testing days. In fact, I believe that when one considers the essence of education, the term “testing” should be the last to come to mind.

I am not supporting the eradication of “testing” in schools; actually, I am pretty good at unimaginative things like that and without it I would have never been inducted into the National Honors Society considering that I am a fairly unimaginative, poorly educated person. Instead, my solution to the education problem is a cliché that I mentioned in the beginning of this article: we need better good teachers. Good teachers are like catalysts in chemical reactions, shortening our path to enlightenment instead of lowering activation energy. I expect a good teacher to inspire, not instruct. I expect him to teach from his heart, not from his books. A good teacher goes beyond the curriculum and teaches his students what it takes to be a thinking human being, not a test-taking machine. But I also understand the difficulty on the part of the teachers because we live in a society that makes a fetish of protocols, guidelines, and other “objective measures” such as standardized testing scores. So yes, we need better teachers, but I don’t blame the teachers because they are chained to the current rigid, bureaucratic schooling system as much as we are.

Now, please allow me to express my most sincere optimism regarding education in my typically unoriginal way:

God bless America.