The Real Problem with Education Today

"If it's broke, fix it"

What keeps American students from ranking like Japanese, Swedish, Hungarian, or Singaporean students do? They’re some of the most educated and smartest kids on earth. While the U.S. isn’t at the bottom of the list, we have states where 24 schools are “teaching” students who can’t even read. Our children aren’t even getting the basics, so what’s really wrong with education in America?

Identifying the Problem

We can name many things. We’ve dumbed down our students by hiring DEI teachers. We’ve tested schools to death, but then left critical skills on the table in school districts with low budgets and sketchy community support, let alone teacher and administrative support. We’ve allowed trans activists to take over our schools to teach children that their God-given sex is mutable instead of teaching them math, science, and reading comprehension.

These are all contributors, but here’s what two young entrepreneurs suggest we do to fix these and other problems that are glaringly obvious in American school systems: use creative, hands-on solutions instead of keeping the status quo that’s been in place in classrooms for decades.

If’ It’s Broke. . .

Let’s look at a few of these issues:

Teaching methods are outdated. We live in the age of information and endless media. Students are expected to listen to humdrum teachers drone on about subjects that could be gamified or taught using online deliverables. Some of the brightest subject-matter experts could teach the masses, rather than having a second-rate teacher deliver a teaching curriculum that’s older than a moldy lunchroom sandwich.

Teaching content could also be personalized to students so that it speaks to their innate interests and grows their fascination with subjects that are unfamiliar to them.

Imagine young Sara or Muhammed learning math in the context of jet propulsion if they’re fascinated with that topic already, or healthy stewardship, planning, and business acumen through gardening and selling their school-grown fruits and vegetables at a local farmer’s market. We’re talking real-life skills, and developing awe in students. Not giving them the mundane worksheets filled with questions like “If Sara is given two oranges and she leaves one in her lunch bag, how many does she have left?” We should be elevating creative genius, not squashing it in school.

Barriers to accessibility could also be overcome. Imagine a learning impaired student or someone with partial blindness listening to music that teaches them history or physics, rather than having a special education teacher try to force-feed subject-matter to students in a boring classroom.

Tech-driven Tools are Underutilized

Tech-driven tools could deliver skill-focused curricula that are tailored to students and their future goals, not regurgitated textbook nonsense from 1984.

Community-based learning could garner the strengths of successful and learned elders in the community to teach students, instead of relying on people who’ve never run a business to teach kids how to run one, for example. Education could be so much more engaging.

Dehumanizing Students

In one documentary-style YouTube video, the trials and tribulations of Jamie Burns, and Hin Tai Ting, two entrepreneurs trying to make a dent in the education system discuss the gross mismanagement of funds that are supposed to be ear-marked for education in this country.

Hin Tai Ting asserts that our current educational system dehumanizes students turning them into sets of data instead of eager, adept individuals capable of learning and understanding in a mutable world beyond standardized tests and federal or state quotas.

Tai ting also attests that because we live in a materialist world, non-materialist methods of assessment are ignored and students end up belittled. Educators and administrators are more interested in lining their pockets than in inspiring curiosity and awe in students that might lead to deep, life-long learning.

Character development or life skills are also absent from educational systems, and are equally as important as math, science, and reading. In the current educational system, integrity, kindness, and honesty are not even modeled, let alone taught.

As @amuse on X muses, the educational industrial complex is freaking out as Trump tries to shift money out of union executive positions for people who make over half a million a year, while teachers’ salaries do’t even make a living wage. He is right in calling these people parasites. Their greed overrides the actual education of our children.

It’s obvious that the education system is broken in America. There is so much promise, though. It’s just time to divorce ourselves from outdated systems, greedy boards and administrative staff that d’t really add to our children’s well-being, and start looking at new ways to teach kids what they really need to know going into the next century.