The real problem with American public education?

As many of my faithful readers know (all four of you), I am very interested in the role of games in education.  And while I don’t consider games to be the panacea for all our ills in education, I do think they can really push us in the right direction.

After reading and digesting The World is Flat, my wife and I started talking about education.  She is European and came from a very different educational background.  As we were talking about what’s wrong with American education, and American competitiveness, we tossed around some ideas, and came up with the following questions:

* Maybe our students just aren’t working hard enough?
* Maybe parents don’t make education a high-enough priority?
* Perhaps we aren’t doing the right kind of work in school (like focusing on basic skills instead of innovative thinking)?
* Maybe we are doing pretty good, and the media is tainting our perceptions with yellow-journalism.

I’m not saying our kids aren’t capable of working hard enough, but as I think about American shrinking dominance in the world (which I think is happening) I look back on our educational system, and wonder how we can do it better.

When I was living in China, I noted the kids weren’t more or less smarter than any other kid - they just worked much much harder than students I was used to working with.

I write this as a question, looking for a response and any comments.

On 08 August 2006, Raj Boora inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

I don’t think you have to go very far to see examples within the US (and Canada).

It seems to me that there is generally a weaker culture of respect toward education, a lack of appreciation of delayed gratification and a lack of resources from the government.

My own circle of friends, consisting mostly of people with at least one university degree all had parents that instilled respect for teachers and education in to their children.  University was never an option.  Teachers were respected next to parents and in some case God (the chain often went Parents, God, Teachers) and this lead to kids that worked very hard in school.

Looking at others that I know and other groups that I work with, the biggest issue seems to be that teachers are not respected.  They are not respected because the curriculum isn’t relevant, the resources are lacking and the moral is just gone. I think this is the root of why the North Atlantic students are generally suffering.  If we add this to the “I want it now’ attitude that I see many kids with today (they seem to think that the finished, polished product has no baby steps to get there), teachers are starting to get into a rough spot - no breaks to be be had from the top or the bottom.

I could go on, but that should be a good start.

On 08 August 2006, Dave McDivitt inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

I will try not to ramble on about this but the work ethic of American kids decreases every year that I teach.  I am starting 13 in less than a week.  The affluence of America brings complacency, and complacency brings a level of laziness.  Of course laziness is seen in all aspects of society but a lazy student does not excel at anything.  There are many problems in education:  poor parenting, poor teacher training, poor curriculum, and generally an apathetic attitude toward our child care system…...opps I meant to say education system.  With all of that said, America still has a great number of fantastic students.  I believe the top level students still are competitive with the world.  However, I really think we start to fall behind with the average student. 

My hardest working student in 12 years of teaching…with out a doubt….was from Romania.  I have also had kids from Azerbaijan, Kazykstan, Mexico, Germany, and Korea.  Not all foreign exchange kids work hard but the Eastern Block kids busted their butts in the classroom.

On 16 August 2006, test inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

Test comment by Bill.

On 01 September 2006, Owen inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

I think it also has to do with many of the social values that are in America. Anti-intellectualism is a large one. We’ll elect a dumb American as president before we elect a genius from Harvard. The funnier character on TV is always the one that has some sort of physical goofiness or is in some way a mook.

So being dumb is not seen as necessarily a bad thing. Mix that with the importance of pop culture and the modern idea of money and the value of hard work (which is extremely low) and you get a recipe for kids that just don’t care much about learning. And if they do care about learning, most still don’t care about trying hard.

I think Raj has a good point, but it’s not necessarily always about the teachers. Kids don’t have much respect for any adults these days.

This is a great topic and one that could be developed in a series of documentaries and books. It’s expansive, and I think the answers lie in the very core of what our country holds as being valuable.