The Educational Handicap of the American Student

            The United States of America is the most innovative country in the world.  However, our public education system is potentially stifling future innovation, which could harm our national and economic security.  Innovation is being stifled because our public education system continues to remain mired in its past glory days when high school graduates were among the brightest and hardest worker in the world. 

Our public education system continues to reflect an antiquated ideology of a long expired industrial age.  With behemoth school buildings that hold up to a thousand or more students (depending on the grade), buildings that mirror industrial factories and classrooms that represent a cold and sterile factory floor, the buildings do not reflect the image of students’ being prepared for a global economy.

The curriculum of our public education system also continues to reflect the antiquated ideology of an expired industrial age.  Students are being taught in a manner that inhibits critical thinking, discourages alternative ways of thinking that go beyond the prescribed method of instruction and suppresses students’ ability to question or challenge prescribed answers.  Additionally, the curriculum continues to provide instruction in a manner that is fragmented and disconnected.  The sequencing of courses and the randomness of electives fails to provide students’ with a continuum of learning that allows the content of courses and electives to connect with what was previously learned and what will be learned in future courses or electives. 

Lastly, the public education system is disconnected from the world of work.  Absent are “applied” courses that demonstrate how the core subjects” math, science, reading, and writing are utilized daily in the workplace.  The failure of the public education system to directly illustrate to students’ how the core subjects have real world applications, deprives students of the ability to understand what they are learning and how it will determine access to future occupational opportunities.  Additionally, the lack of technology instruction in schools prevents students’ from being able to access technology in a manner that has applications in the real world.  It is this lack of technological instruction that is the most damaging to students,’ to innovation and to economic and national security.

Failing to move beyond the expired industrial ideology and connect learning and technological instruction to the world of work, students’ have become disengaged in their education and fail to fully achieve their academic potential.  Thus students’ become educationally handicapped and unprepared to compete in a global economy.  The inability of the educationally handicap to compete in the global economy weakens our country and threatens our economic and national security.

Who would have thought the real threat to our country is our public education system.