Education these days in my opinion is to teach obedience, so when you grow up you are susceptible to suggestion and blindly follow rules given by higher up people.

Only those with an open mind will carve their way out and make their own destiny in life.

I'm sorry but nowadays education is a joke, the sooner we realize this, the sooner we can start fixing that problem.

IMO when you get into highschool if you tend to votech as a course it will balance everything out, but it depends on the course in that program

Schools really only care about if you turn the assignment in.. The education system doesnt teach you much anymore. IMO they only care about turning in assignments..

Shep wrote Schools really only care about if you turn the assignment in.. The education system doesnt teach you much anymore. IMO they only care about turning in assignments..

its teaches you responsibility, ability to adapt and learn new things. The schooling system is probably not the best it could be but its far from terrible. It isn't there to make you into sheep, only pot smoking hacker wannabes think that.

Talking about education as a whole without making a distinction about which system or which country's system you are referring to is not very helpful.
As this website's main demographic is people from the United States, that is the system which I will be referring to from now on.

This is a very complex problem and requires a multi-pronged set of solutions to tackle effectively, so i'm only going to look at two of the main problems and the solutions to those problems, but there are still many more that I am not going to tackle in this post for the sake of not writing an essay.

Many of the criticisms of the education system that I see on the internet are quite shallow, not because they are wrong, but because they don't offer any solutions to the problems that they rightly raise.
It is always a couple of sentences or a two minute video about how unfair the system is and it amounts to nothing more than whining. Would we expect a presidential candidate to stand up on the debate stage and say "I dislike the American education system because it is unfair and it needs to be fixed" without then offering ways in which it could be fixed?

We need to stop assuming that the people in charge of the education system are going to listen to our criticisms and concoct their own solutions.
The outcry about the failure of the education system is not a new phenomenon, it has existed for decades and while the facts being taught have become more pointed in their accuracy, the problems with teachings methods - which are still being raised today - have not been fixed.

They aren't responding to our whines, we need to start discussing solutions and putting them forward in bulk.

Problem 1: Standardized Tests

Standardized testing is the most commonly put forward criticism of the education system, and rightly so.
The root of this problem needs to be looked at first, before a solution can be formed.

Schools are government funded. This means that it is all about the money. State governments put forward plans for schools called AYP plans. Adequate Yearly Progress. These plans say that if a school does not reach a certain, progressing, percentage pass rate for standardized tests each year then their funding will be cut and audits will be imposed.

This might seem like a good system at first glance, but it is heavily flawed on a basic mathematical level.
If one group of students enters the school at the lowest year when the AYP is 50%, and throughout their years the adequate pass rate increased to 70%, 80%, 90%, and eventually 100%, that seems correct. It makes sense that the pass rate would go up as the students get more and more knowledgeable.
That is until those students leave and the 100% AYP is imposed on the new first year students. Funding is cut, audits are imposed, and agents are sent in to monitor the school.

This kind of testing is not only flawed intellectually, but it is also harming the economics of schooling in the US.

What is the solution?
I believe the solution to this problem is two-sided. There is the issue of how students should be tested, and then how teachers should be tested.

Firstly, let's tackle how students should be tested.
Teachers should be checking that students understand what has been taught during the lesson, not months afterwards at the end of the year. As for the ways in which students could be assessed, the list is almost endless. They could write essays, film videos, write poems, give speeches, perform dramatic plays, or any other of the many ways in which people can demonstrate understanding of a topic by doing something which suits their learning style.

This, inevitably, means that teachers will have more work to do and have a harder time putting a grade on understanding, but it will lessen the stress in other areas of their work by allowing students who would otherwise be difficult and annoying to engage with a subject and feel good about going to school.

These grades should be decided by their teachers, not by an outside body who don't know the children in question or how they learn. This is supposed to give the impression of the system being unbiased, but it simply gives the reality of inaccurate grading.
There are other methods by which teachers can be kept in check, as we will now move on to...

How should teachers be tested?
Teachers, at the moment are subject to either 8 evaluations per year if they are in their first 3 years of teaching or 2 per year if longer. This is a mistake.

Teachers become complacent in lessons where they are not being observed. Everybody who has been to a public school knows that once every few months your teacher will tell you that someone is coming in to observe the class to you all have to be on your best behavior. Looking back on those lessons you are probably mortified that those words even needed to be uttered.

Classrooms should have cameras and microphones in them livestreaming every lesson to school administrators and parents of students in those lessons. Modern technology more than allows for this.
It removes the complacency of teachers who think that they can get away with copying pages out of text books and giving their students hand outs, it provides a recorded history of each lesson and ways for teachers to improve their standards of teaching.
It also provides a recording of the lesson for parents to help their children with homework, and it allows the administration to spot students who are being distracting during lessons.

This may seem like a very hawkish proposal, but what privacy rights are being violated any more than having security cameras in a shop, or on police officers? These cameras are there to make sure that in those environments people are doing what they are supposed to be doing.

Problem 2: Funding

This is probably the most infuriating issue when it comes to the education system when it is properly considered, and thankfully it is very easy to summarize.
The government needs to see education as a literal business investment. Areas of higher education have less poverty, less crime, their inhabitants pay their taxes and put more money into the economy.
This would alleviate stress on other areas like policing, the prison system, and welfare programs.

Consider that The Pentagon is planning on spending 391.2 billion dollars on 2,443 fighter jets, and the cost of maintaining those jets will push the cost into the trillions of dollars price range.

This is enough money to easily buy every single student in the education system an iPad and Kindle to remove the need for text books and backpacks and give each student an individual way to learn using said devices and there would still be billions left over for whatever else might help people learn.

The simple solution to this problem is that the government needs to reassess what it views as important.
As I have already pointed out, higher education areas have less strain on government funded institutions because many of them are a safety-net that people of higher education rarely need to use.

Education needs to be viewed as an investment in the future of the country and the system - as it stands at the moment - is wrought with issues which need solving.
Considering almost every school in the country rallies under the banners of 'Educating for the future' it would be great if the government could actually help teachers and school administrators to achieve this goal by giving them the funding they need to do their jobs not just adequately, but imaginatively and efficiently.

Just to clarify my position, I don't hate the education system. I think it does a decent job with the tools it has been given. I don't think the teachers or students are entirely to blame for its failings.
However, the amount of room for improvement is staggering.
There is probably no other government funded institute in America which needs more improvement than the education system.
My solutions to these problems are obviously open to criticism, but a conversation needs to be had about what can be done to improve the education system, rather than simply pointing out its flaws.
I would even go so far as to argue that this issue is more consequential and in need of an open market of ideas than an issue like gun control.

It also seems like this is one of the few issue where most people agree with each other on some level and the most progress can be made.