IS THE AMERICAN EDUCATION SYSTEM STILL TOO “RULE-BASED”?
When in school, following rules was integral to education. While I do see a point to following rules in the first place — the establishment of trust within the pupil that “this is how you understand this once you go through things step-by-step” — there was something archaic about how much school stressed this rule-following. It’s believed to be a product of the Industrial Revolution, when our primary focus was to create punctual factory workers who did as they were told.
Anyone remember doing a worksheet that gave you a series of steps to follow, only to learn that step one was to “write your name on the page and stop”? They would trick and test you to follow rules.
As I went through the education system, I felt that the curriculum would continue with this standardized testing-focused, rule-following mentality that in general discourages the subjectivity and free thought that’s seen more in college. Your child is behind because she’s not doing things the right way.
First off, in no way am I trying to write a smear piece on teachers and what they do. My mom was a teacher, and I understand the behind-the-scenes to all of the politics that go into the education system. Teachers aren’t making these policies — they have to enact them. This profession is not appreciated nearly as much as it should be. Understatement of the century.
Secondly, I’m also not proposing that following rules and providing a right answers-vs-wrong answers curriculum should be completely nixed out of the education system. For safety and efficiency’s sake, some rules are inevitable — a consistent start-stop time for classes, no running in the hallway, having to raise your hand to answer a question, etc.
Also, there are things that are simply factual. When we learn what those factual things are, and more importantly, how we can independently discern why they’re factual, the better. I think we have an epidemic of mistrust in information because we may not be teaching people as well as we should on how to find factual, trustworthy evidence to understand their opinions. I could go on about how I think that hurts us as a society, but…that’s perhaps another time.
Finally, I’m speaking in extremely broad strokes here. I’ve had so many great teachers in middle and high school who would stage Socratic discussions, opened the class up for opinions, and truly promoted learning.
Things are evolving. Why, though, are we marking papers when they don’t solve the problem the “right” way? When a student “circles” the verb instead of “underlines” it (true thing that happened to me)?
I don’t want to speak out of turn — I’m not an educator, I’m not a policy-maker, I’m not a parent, and I’m not (currently) a student. I see articles from institutes and educators that discuss in detail understandable faults to the controversial Common Core system. When we live in the Information Age when students are still being taught that there is only “one right way”, understand that they’re surrounded by computers that figure out multiple ways to solve problems. It’s kind of paradoxical. Are there many ways or one way to figure things out?
We’re also not teaching people to become factory workers. The world is shifting to a significantly more creative, competitive, ideas-based world. Students need to know how to get over obstacles, how to really understand the why behind things, how to collaborate with others, and how to find solutions from a variety of angles. Are these things being taught in schools? Sure — but maybe we need to press more on it.
In 2020, school saw a mass shift from the classroom to the computer. We had to evolve overnight. No longer is the “doing things the one, right way” mindset as relevant when there had to be a massive think-outside-the-box solution for schooling.
Change is hard. Rules also create control — which become necessary when teaching an entire community of kids for about 35 hours a week. Whether there should be rules or not isn’t the concern. However, whether or not we’re teaching kids to obey the right things becomes an issue that affects students, staff, and communities alike.
