I NOW understand how elders always complain about how the next generation will not understand how hard they had it before them. I think about how my grandparents who were born before 1920 could actually view the world as well as the different generations in it. They didn’t have telephones, cell phones, televisions, Ipad, Ianything, and you actually had to write a letter as the internet wasn’t a concept yet. They built things to last, if it broke it was fixed, and if it was dropped it would probably break whatever it fell on top of. They actually knew how to take care of things as well as knowing the value of things. They also knew that in order to succeed at something you needed to study and learn how things work. Many of these people worked right as soon as they graduated high school as well as being able to understand how to do the many things that the world have to offer.
The children these days think that they deserve to have things done as easily as possible no matter what the outcome is. They want to have everything handed to them without doing any of the work to get it. We have taught them that everything is expendable and that if you break something not to worry about it because somebody will always get you another one no matter the cost. We are raising a generation where they are bound to become non-thinkers. We want them dumb down so they cannot take steps forward on their own and think about what they want to be when they grow up. We are holding their hands at every step of life and will always bail them out when they get into trouble.
The United States is no longer even in the top 10 when it comes to mathematics, science, or reading. According to the December 3, 2013 issue of the Business Insider we are 31st when it comes to mathematics, 24th when it comes to reading, and 21st when it comes to science. This is out of 65 different countries that participate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We are failing to help our children as well as our teachers when it comes to our education standards.
The cause of this blog is my 10 year old daughter and 15 year old stepson. I was told that my stepson would be getting an Ipad from the school in order to learn from. They will no longer have to take notes because the teachers will be airdropping the notes to these tablets. While this may seem to be a good idea I think that it is just the federal government keeping the kids from actually learning the correct way to do things and the way they want the kids to learn how to do things. We now have the federal government telling our teachers and children how and what they will learn. It is no longer about the teachers who paid for their education, who gave up their free time to do what they passionately wanted to do. It is now about passing students whether they deserved it or not. It is no longer about making sure that those students will actually be able be a fully functional person, it is about making sure these numbers look good in their books.
While the kids these days may understand more about technology than my grandparents or my parents do, they do not understand how to truly take advantage of everything that is out there. While we are in a era of where technology is continuously improving each year, we cannot allow it to start running our lives as well as teaching our children how they should be taught as well what was they should be thinking. While I am all for having technology in the classroom it should be used as a tool not as away to keep students from learning or teachers from actually teaching in their classrooms. I was told that teachers allow to have students to have their cell phones in their classrooms. This is causing many distractions in the classroom in which the students cannot learn or the teachers cannot teach.
You might think that I am being harsh on the way that children should be taught yet I have seen how some of them do write their papers. They are continuously using the same topic sentence either in the next paragraph or they have been rewritten somewhere else in another paragraph. I don’t understand how these kids can continuously pass something like this through out their entire high school career. If they cannot come up with their own thoughts as well as being able to actually express their ideas than it is time to take the technology out. We are dumbing down our children with the way we allow our children to be taught in our schools.
I remember when I was going through school and we had to do some actual research in order to write our essays and we had to understand the way an essay is to be written. While I am reading through their “essay” the is no set topic let alone a lot of the words are misspelled. I am told that the teachers doesn’t care about the misspelled words or if the essay can actually be understood. I remember how it was while I was in school and if you didn’t write the paper correctly you either had to do it all over again or you received a bad grade.
A lot of what I have learned over the years has been on my own. My teachers would help me as much as they could because they were interested in my ideas also. My ideas were never put on the back burner like most children ideas are now. I didn’t have the internet back then to actually learn how to put things together. Our children do not know what it is like to have to actually learn by trial and failure. They only want to have things done now and at that moment rather than sit and wait or learn how to do things themselves.
We all need to stand up against the way that people want our children to learn, the way that is dumbing down the United States. We need to take back our country and education so we can bring the United States back into the top ten where we need to have it.