The Ghetto School

The idea of a school stands as something of a paradox in people’s minds. They will know school, often very intimately, but their knowledge means nothing because their school has changed drastically, often for the worse. In half a decade, student populations can double or triple; two dozen portables can eat up the extra space meant for the soccer field; minorities in a school can become majorities; the norm for student behavior can plummet dramatically; and only a tenth of whole staff remains to see it happen. This happens often, especially in growing cities. People today have yet to know what the average school is like, and this causes a serious problem. The primary obstruction towards serious reform in education frequently originates from people’s memories taking precedence over reality. In order to truly understand and correct the problems of education today, dutiful citizens must acquaint themselves with today’s school, otherwise known as the ghetto school.

The ghetto school’s name derives from the colloquial understanding of ghetto, which generally refers to a closed off community that is often crowded, ugly, and wrought with problems frequently related to ignorance and poverty. The ghetto school shares this meaning, but in an educational context. They are overcrowded, ugly, and wrought with problems due to the misallocation of funds and depleted brainpower from students. Students in the ghetto carry the dreams and ideals of peasants. Those dreams sadly derive from most of the garbage they inculcate from television, the internet, videogames, or the kids around them. Thus, instead of dreaming of the future and making their mark in the world, they dream of owning loud stereo systems, sleeping with the opposite sex, and acquiring hideous but expensive fashion accessories otherwise known as “bling.”

The primary attribute of the ghetto school that affects everything else is overcrowding. Public schools rarely have quotas, so their student populations have consequently exceeded capacity. Everyone suffers from this. Students and teachers jam themselves into a dank room, scuttling into their chairs since space for walking ceases to exist. The teachers will often share rooms with other teachers because the lack of classrooms. This forces some of them to pack all their supplies into a cart with which they “float” into different classrooms every period. In schools that truly bust at the seams with students, the auditoriums, cafeterias, and libraries will also serve as classrooms.

Naturally, the preponderance of children diminishes the authority of every adult as students organize into mobs letting troublemakers weave in and out of mischief with the protection of a boisterous crowd of adolescents. At this point, the school will forego many designated consequences because of mere logistical issues. Forcing detentions or parent conferences on kids with too many tardies, prompt intervention for failing grades or truancy, or simply keeping the halls clear of kids during instruction are unfeasible actions to carry out. While school efficiency plays an immense role in this system failure, the sheer number of students will sometimes make enforcement of basic rules near impossible. Consequently, a massive portion of students comes continually late if at all, fail classes, and loiter in the halls with impunity. Students that lack a strong guiding presence at home -and this is very common- are doomed in this setting. When given the choice to learn in a classroom or waste away time doing nothing or something illegal, these kids will always opt for the latter.

In this situation, school administrators will pick and choose what behaviors deserve a serious response and requires the least administrative work. This means that they often end up handling illegal activity only. This includes: fights, theft, drug abuse, drug dealing, vandalism, gang involvement, prostitution, and truancy (although this one usually ends up being an afterthought). Fortunately, the truly dangerous students will face some kind of resistance. The less dangerous students, who still eviscerate the learning environment, will fly under the radar and wreak havoc in classes. They will disrupt any semblance of order, shatter any expectation, and will deprive any student of feeling comfortable in class. They are the suicide bombers ready to bring everyone down to hell with them. They do this because, like suicide bombers, they know that destruction is the only thing they can do successfully. Destruction will make them known, the teachers learning their names before anyone. All the while, their world will not lift a finger against them because it does not want the responsibility. In vain, teachers will document and try his best to at least minimize the constant disruption and its degenerative effect on the class as a whole.

As a rule, ghetto schools always contain the shoddiest accommodations. They are poorly built and usually have the most wretched Soviet-inspired designs. The bathrooms suffer from bad plumbing that turns them into literal cesspools. The ceilings leak after rains. The fire alarms go off at random moments, effectively blowing out everyone’s eardrums. Students further assist matters by littering every corner, plugging up sinks and toilets to further flood bathrooms while defacing the walls, desks, doors, and pretty much any surface with graffiti.

Therefore, the deplorable physical setting will naturally take its toll on the mental and emotional setting of the ghetto school. Candidly speaking, school is often the place where dreams die. Students learn to lie, cheat, steal, and embrace despair. They put their heads down for hours at a time shunning work. They silence their minds in fear of the other students stigmatizing them. Those who had a chance, sit idly for hours because the work that the teachers assign is easy. In general, students learn how to not learn. Rather they seek happiness and meaning by destroying things or engaging in sexual relationships way before they have the proper level of maturity. They become parents, causing a blow to any future they, or their newborns, might have had. Teachers infused with passion and zeal for education harden their demeanors, gradually assuming the role of an unflinching cynics all too familiar with the mediocrity of their situation. Very few of them stay; most of them leave.

In the end, the ghetto school favors the worst from all groups. Only the idiotic students get by unscathed by the experience. Only the worst teachers pass the days without any murmurs from their clouded conscience. Only the most corrupt administrators keep the school running poorly without reproach from the outside. The rest just keep from perishing.

The atrocious atmosphere of these schools now force parents with any income will find a private school nearby or move out altogether. Hence, those without any means but many children populate the ghetto schools. Public schools in normal cities now primarily serve the poorer classes while the middle class has to pay dearly for their children’s education, either through living in an expensive suburb or finding a private school. In order to entice a few middle class white students, some ghetto schools will provide an honors track, which provides a protective bubble from all the surrounding trash. Unfortunately, even these bubbles sometimes pop and become corrupted over time.

Schools have changed enormously in the past decade. The ghetto school has ceased to be the exception found only in pockets of an urban community. It is now the norm. People that reminisce of their teenage years so many generations back need to look again. Otherwise, ghetto schools will expand and continue producing the people society deplores most: convicts and beggars.

Subbing and Retail

The Mission

In the movie, “The Mission”, Jeremy Irons plays the role of the missionary entering the Amazon to spread the gospel and civilize the savages. Viewers can recount the amazing trials and tribulations that the missionary went through to reach his lost flock in the jungle. He climbs up a waterfall with nothing but a knapsack and calms a tribe of hostile natives by playing his oboe. With time and unbreakable conviction, he raises the mission and the quality of life for the savages and an errant Spanish conquistador guilty of fratricide. Even the unbeliever will marvel at the determination of this missionary and his accomplishment. In the course of Western history, he was simply one of many to help colonize and civilize the untamed New World. The missionaries carried an unflinching resolve to lead a moral religious life and ward off the evil influences of barbarism present in both native and European cultures. Now that times have changed, modern secular educational institutions must assume these duties or watch the progress of the human spirit deteriorate.

The school needs a mission that fights the pernicious influences that abound in the world and at home. This has not always been the case in American society, but times have changed. A surprisingly large amount of parents have abrogated their parenting duties to instill morality in their young ones. Children today grow up without a code of ethics, a sense of the honorable, or an ideal. Atrocities that occur more frequently in the news confirm the deterioration of character; to name a few: school shootings, gang shootings (Chicago has more than 22 students killed on a school campus), student brutality, rising teen pregnancy, and unmitigated drug abuse. People shouldn’t make the mistake of likening today’s miscreants with lovable fabrications of Mark Twain, stupidly quoting, “Kids will be kids.” While they are still human, adults have let youth become morally barbaric (for lack of a better word) because they neglected their obligation to civilize. Reasons for this may happily fill the lucubrations of any periodical or blog, but the schools are the ones who need to cope with this challenge.

Unfortunately, many schools and educators will not acknowledge this challenge. This would naturally require more accountability and more energy than the current mission of most schools: Keep ‘em in the building and make sure the pass that stupid state test. The challenge of civilizing children would require schools to adopt measures that assume a new authority that oversees the academic and moral growth of each individual student. Schools shudder at all these measures because most of them have adopted “one-size-fits-all” approach that somehow leads to college. This approach is cheaper, easier to implement, and much easier to define. If any aberrations occur, usually among the extremes on the intellectual spectrum (the brilliant and the slow), the parents would normally supplement the school’s glaring inadequacies. Parents would also address the moral education of the students as well. Now that parents do not take on either of these responsibilities, schools must now adapt like missions had to adapt to the natives and take up the responsibilities themselves.

Successful civilizing measures contain these elements: flexible curriculum that allows alternatives for blooming adolescents, a discipline system that actually corrects behavior, and some indoctrination of values. All three elements feed into the other. A student freely and happily determines his fate when given the opportunity (alternatives) and the training (discipline). This student can embrace this training in usefulness and civic responsibility by having a strong set of priorities and values (indoctrination). Almost every successful educational institution in the world follows these three precepts, and it’s time that the United States follows suit.

Naturally, instilling these three aspects will meet with some objections that, however deleterious, hold sway in the educational conscience of the United States. People argue that promoting each of these parts would somehow diminish equal opportunity as advertised by the present educational system.

Detractors will say that creating alternative tracks prematurely posits a social hierarchy that denies an all-including route to higher abstract education. They overlook the fact that many students do not need to go to college for what they choose to do in life. They also hold a quixotic assumption that all students can do college work, which they cannot. This one-track goal, weakly held by students and educators alike, actually limits the freedom a person can choose in their profession and simply wastes time and money for an end that could be reached at an earlier time.

Similar objections are used in implanting a discipline system that corrects bad behavior. Detractors will claim that this should be done by the parents. They will also claim that actively correcting a person’s behavior might hurt their self-esteem and traumatize their educational experience with exaggerated personal anecdotes aplenty. Above all, they will always question whether the behavior even requires correction. However, schools uselessly rely on parents who in turn rely back on them for discipline, so the school still has the problem. Correctional measures will always overrule inaction or temporary isolation. Bad behavior usually spawns from a low self-esteem and often serves as an indicator that the child indirectly craves real (not fake) encouragement that comes with a correction in behavior. Harmful or disruptive behavior endangers the student as well as the students around him or her. Their education suffers; their view of school suffers (humans naturally desire order over chaos); and they suffer from emotional and sometimes physical distress. Both academic and social problems should be addressed with discipline that can correct it. As everyone averts their eyes, the disruptive students will either wreak havoc on a classroom, or they will be taken away and sent through a disciplinary system that further abets delinquency and eventually leads to a life in the penitentiary. This situation should never even arise if it were fully addressed early in life.

Modern citizens of the United States have learned to shudder at the word, indoctrination, especially in the context of their children. However, there is really no better way to describe the process of creating a moral and academic foundation for a developing human bring through constant and unremitting exposure. In some cases, parents believe that such a drastic move in creating an objective good and bad in a person limits the poor kid’s freedom, so they go ahead and spoil their offspring, hoping daycare or school can do it for them. In a majority of modern situations, the child will often lack a responsible parent, let alone two parents, to indoctrinate them in a wholesome moral upbringing. In any case, parents forget to realize that this formative part of a child’s upbringing will come from some other source if it doesn’t come from them. Many adults shun their duty to inculcate virtue; children now receive their indoctrination from undesirable outlets like videogames, Internet, televisions, or thugs on the street.

The school now serves as a bastion to culture and tradition whether people care to acknowledge it or not. These cultural and traditional values that have brought civilization’s greatest achievements should rest in the mind of every developing adult. Like missionaries that viewed savagery and faced it with absolute purpose, educators must now face a new savagery devoid of consciousness and responsibility and face it with the same resolve. In the past, the wills of missionaries helped society ascend from the Dark Ages. In the future, the wills of teachers might need to prevent a frightening return to those Dark Ages.

Based on a true story...

Got to admit, it's getting better...

We’ve hit April now, and I feel like I’m hitting my stride. The students have calmed down. The potential dropouts have either grown out of it or finally dropped out. Those extremely dysfunctional students now warm the seats at the alternative campus or have been finally rescheduled by the counselors. My classes have started on The Pearl by Steinbeck. Right now, I feel completely in control.

This wasn’t always the case. Many different challenges plagued each day. After freshman thaw from the first shock of high school during those first few months they can really be a thorn in the side of a young teacher filled with hopes of changing a student’s life. The multitude sway in the direction the disruptive kids blow. The disruptive kids try to establish their territory and are happily cultivating the disciplinary records with perpetual flare, triumphing in a teacher’s failure to teach. Students report to class tardy, disheveled with attention to the latest ghetto fashions, and without supplies. Coming out of summer, everyone flaunts with pride just how stupid, lazy, and destructive they are. Those with a gram of maturity hide it for fear of their lives.

For a teacher, even a new one, this situation is not impossible. I had strategies to neutralize the rotters, to pacify the most active disruptors, and to push the recalcitrant yet pliable multitude of students. Still, employing these strategies never assured a calm day. I remember almost everyday dreading at least one or two moments that I know would arrive. There were a group of students that I knew would raise a scene that would wreck my class’s attention and my authority into pieces. Like a general planning his next move, I played a chess game that anticipated the moves of these problematic children strategically placed in my class to make my job that much harder. Other times, I would worry about the acceptable format of lesson plans, staff development sessions, the growing number of rotters sleeping in my class and failing, the frustrations of teaching reading to adolescents still struggling with phonics. Somehow, I made it and kept my cool. I credit getting a sufficient amount of sleep (this was vital), and those close to me serving as sound boards (this was even more vital). Unfortunately, I got to see some others break down under the strain.

Throughout the first semester, I tried and retried different methods of teaching the students about plot, about characters, about setting. I reviewed these terms, modeled them countless times. Repetition was my middle name. I lectured and brought out real world examples. Two thirds of my classes defied the odds and made good progress. Still, my last classes in the afternoon would always manage to dampen my outlook on the day. The students in my 4th and 8th periods (it’s a block schedule) never finished their assignments. I could prod them, explain every question, hint at every answer, but they just languished like cows in the field. A few of them are roused into some kind of activity now, but they still could do better.

Like a composer listing his monumental operas (think of that movie, Amadeus), I like to list my novels that my students have successfully finished: The Outsiders, Animal Farm, and hopefully in a few weeks, The Pearl. Between these, the kids have hustled their brains on short stories, newspaper articles, essays, and vocabulary and grammar exercises (much of this material, I had to write up myself). I’m happy to say that all my classes have expanded their vocabulary and comprehension, becoming better readers and thinkers. The time it took in the beginning for 10 pages ranged around an hour (yes, that long!), now that has been cut in half with more of the material retained. I have been able to eventually sneak in some more mature concepts and higher level thinking with a better reception. Quite a number have finally touched the big black monolith and discovered Reasoning. With this, I keep on chugging, knowing that I have made a difference and that I'm doing a pretty swell job teaching, so I can’t stop now.

Over the year, I find it interesting how a separation emerges between classes because of the dynamics of the students. The level of progress between my two best and my two worst classes fascinates me and confirms a few notions I’ve had about the impact bad and lazy kids can have on a class. To put it concisely, they’re disastrous. A disruptive lazy kid can hold back months, even years, of academic progress the adjacent students might have. They stop activity, delay instruction, annihilate motivation, and will utterly demolish a teacher’s will to help those struggling.

Case in point, I have made substantial progress in my morning classes (1st and 5th), which now prompts me to make a higher track for them with more novels and more opportunities for analytical discussion. The kids are polite, they work, and their minds and abilities have grown substantially. They can rise above my current work. My two worst (4th and 8th) have made the least progress though I’ve worked the hardest with them. Those two classes account for at least 80 percent of my failures for all six of my classes. They are the most recalcitrant towards any new material and they carry very little motivation. The relevance of my material, the failing grade awaiting them, the disappointment of their parents, and the damning stamp of stupidity; all those things have only change a few of their habits. For them, I’m considering a lower track that they might be able to follow, but I almost think this is amoral. They aren’t that different from my other students; they’re just immature and suffer from some dead weights in the class.

One of my duties as teacher is to isolate, mollify, and hopefully extract these bad influences. Like a ruler punishing criminals, I have to punish the bad kids. Those who aren’t in a school in any capacity will assume I’m just a vindictive teacher out to get those free spirits. Where I work, my bad kids are ones that flirt with crime and dropping out, and many of them come from severely wrecked homes. They thrive on violence, aggression, disorder, and emotions. They’ve never been taught to think or to take responsibilities for themselves, but that have learned to make excuses. They need help in the worst way, and sticking them in my classroom only fuels the fire instead of stopping it. A suitable alternative for these kids needs to be developed so this growing number of children doesn’t end up in prison like they do now.

For now, I’ve done pretty well to keep my classes calm and the students have started listening. Even fourth period is starting to turn around. A teacher once told me that Thanksgiving break will be a teacher’s low point in the year, and that by Spring Break, things will start becoming pleasant. This has been true so far. With only six weeks and a bit left, I can say that this year has been frustrating but somewhat illuminating. There are problems beyond my control, so I can only write about them. Just read this blog. Still, through all the miasmic cynicism that looms in a low-performing urban school, I know that there’s still a good part to salvage.

A rose by any other name might forget to smell as sweet.

“He’s smart but he’s just lazy.” Parents say this to their children. Children say it to themselves and their friends. Even teachers have to say it to irresponsible parents to abnegate any guilt on way they raise their young ones. Actually, in many conscientious districts, many teachers have to substitute the word “lazy” for something less accusatory like “unmotivated” or “unengaged.” While this little phrase happily obviates accountability from all parties, it has wreaked havoc on the developing minds of way too many students. Many sassy little urchins neglecting to read, write, or think early in life will fail miserably when they grow into adulthood. They read at lower grade levels, their maturity is greatly delayed, and they defy reality by claiming intelligence. It’s time to let these students and their parents learn the horrible but liberating truth: They’re stupid, and it’s their own damn fault; it’s up to them to change that. Otherwise a teacher will just be wasting a criminal amount of time for nothing.

This is literarily utter blasphemy for any teacher to even think, but it’s sadly true for a growing amount of students. Try as educators or parents might, their explanations for the struggling students are false. All students being intelligent in their own way is a myth. On the other side of the argument, people should recognize that intelligence being solely dependent on a favorable genetic code is also myth. Common sense can easily thwart the former myth. If one student can successfully read Moby Dick and analyze its plethora of symbols, allegories, and allusions while the other can only read Dr. Seuss and achieve comprehension through the charming illustrations; then there is a tremendous disparity between in their verbal intelligence regardless of how they approach texts. One knows more while the other knows less; this is undisputable. The latter argument parallels a similar argument that genetics determines obesity. There is truth that genes can increase the propensity of acquiring intelligence or weight, but practice and discipline play a far greater role in how a mind or body develops. Perhaps coincidentally, scientist work as ardently on a cure for obesity as they do for mental acuity.

Acquired intelligence does not mysteriously descend on some students; rather, it’s earned. Intelligent people acquire knowledge and skills through solving problems, practicing logic, reading a variety of challenging texts, and composing ideas. Stupid people disband the possibility of acquiring knowledge by turning their brains off at every opportunity. They do not read; they ask others to solve their problems for them; they fidget and daydream at the first mental challenge; they have a very difficult time following directions; they lack any sort of curiosity; they seize every conceivable distraction that will delay the anguish of the boredom to which they’ve irrationally submitted. In concise terms, laziness creates stupidity and exists in conjunction with stupidity. The moment the brain stops working, it starts to degenerate. The moment some youth decides to give up books of a certain grade level, he stays at that reading level until he changes his mind about his reading –unless the grade levels adjust to suit his inferiority.

People must understand that learning process does not skip any steps, but it’s a gradual climb. A student that neglects his children’s books, then young adult books, then some provocative classics, will not be able to read and enjoy Shakespeare. He will simply whine, fidget, and eventually fail –assuming the teacher holds steady on grading standards and doesn’t cave in to the student’s desire for the easy art project. The same thing applies to a student given complex algebra when he still clings to the calculator to do simple arithmetic. All academic disciplines come in steps. People often forget those illustrated children’s classics or those little math games that made a picture, but these types of activities set the foundation for the books or professions that made their life. A stupid person lacks that kind of development and pursues every mental escape from breaking pencils to boozing later on in life.

The debilitating effects of a mentally lazy life will always trouble the person suffering from it. However, just like this person escaped working their minds, they escape taking blame for their inadequacy. Psychologist make their money by whipping up new theories for incompetence like a new strain of ADD, a various learning disorder, a new mental disability, or any various emotional disorder. Most people, smart or stupid, can claim some kind of special education hindering label -and its accompanying “medication”- by the time the graduate. Only a small minority truly qualify for such categorizations. The vast majority of them suffer from nothing except their laziness and its resulting ineptitude. Some even take pride in it, saying how lazy they are but how they cleverly they get away with not being clever.

Teachers have taken on the most abuse for the misunderstanding of stupidity. Most of them can spot the problem quickly, but they have no right to call it a problem or to attempt to solve it. Obviously, solving a problem without acknowledging is simply illogical and thus impossible anyway. Therefore, many teachers avoid the problem altogether by lowering the standard for intelligence thus nullifying stupidity. The stupid kids keep their self-esteem and the teachers are spared from the impossible task of bringing an unwilling kid up to grade-level material. Even the standards for certain grade-levels will decline for the purpose of assuaging spoiled kids that hate thinking. A quick glance at a English textbook in the mid-twentieth century and a glance at one now will instantly show the frightening decline in literacy.

For many people, the epiphany that illuminates an ignoramus of his own ignorance will be the spark of curiosity and lead to a respectable livelihood. For others, they will have parents devoted enough to take away their televisions and leave them no choice but to educate themselves. Unfortunately, the rest often fidget and vegetate their way through life and eventually find themselves wondering at their poverty and ongoing depression. That is the fate of the “lazy but smart” kid. Many of them had a warning from their old-fashioned teachers about this reality, but they heard from their peers, the media, and their parents that they were always smart enough but only a little lazy.

Consciously ignoring stupidity inhibits the work of educators while simultaneously disenfranchising the students who unknowingly suffer from it. Only stupidity results from the vice of mental laziness. These two qualities should never be permissible in a school or home for obvious reasons. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but stupidity by any other name might stink up a child’s opportunity for enlightenment.

Tracking (Part 3: Allegory of the Thirsty Horse)

As far back as Ancient Greece, the poet Hesiod rightly acknowledged the natural hierarchy of civilized societies with three divisions: those who think for themselves (a small portion), those who think as others think (a big portion), and those who don’t think at all (a small portion that seems big). This hierarchy has carried over through the millennia with every society, thinkers teaching and guiding the doers to solve problems while the non thinkers create more problems. As history progresses, the thinkers have established schools to eliminate non-thinkers somehow. Today, American schools try to do this by forcing all students to learn the minimum in the same way whether the students comply or not. Despite the lack of logic in the policy, and the cultural and productive standards diminishing year after year, this is the fair system. This is also an educational system that creates more and more purposeless non-thinkers unable to cope with reality.

Acknowledging this failure of a principle that neglects those who think for themselves and nurtures more non-thinkers, a new policy must arise to spare young Americans from a damning ignorance that they don’t want. This policy must promote independent thinking among the elite (those that strive for excellence), an adherence to good thinking for the rest, and a merciless contempt for ignorance and incompetence that plague a vulnerable few. On this principle of satisfying all three groups, schools must create a relevant institution that will serve the needs of thirsty young minds eager for the power to affect their own destinies. As it stands, too many schools are utterly irrelevant, and they inadvertently lock formerly energetic human beings into vegetating derelicts.

The following allegory illustrates the solution to schools’ responsibility to nurture young minds, and how they have handled them instead. “You can guide a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Instead of heeding this advice, schools have perpetually tried to come up with new ways to make their horses drink. They have tried punishments, coaxing, and a myriad of mind games with the students, but to no avail. The horses resent being forced to drink water and ask for Coca-Cola instead. Finally, the schools give up and comply. They replace the life-giving water with dehydrating Coca-Cola and await praise for at least leading these horses somewhere instead letting the owners have to worry about it. While the owners would prefer their horses drinking water instead of Coca-Cola, they have no solutions of their own. These owners have no water of their own, and the horses don’t seem to like it even though they need it so badly.

One just needs to remember the quote of these recalcitrant drinkers and stop trying to force these horses to drink. Simply forget the Coca-Cola and let the horses drink the water on their own. They will appreciate the water more because it substantially slaked their thirst instead of the cheap sugary thrill that left them even thirstier. The conflict does not stop there though. Coca-Cola has much more power and influence with famous computer generated polar bears gracing their commercials as opposed to water, so the horses will still vehemently demand the soft drink even after they enjoy the refreshing glass of water. The owner knows that a lifetime of drinking soda will rot the young one’s teeth, make one fat, plague one’s brain with headaches, and leave one sluggish and dehydrated. The horse does not know this, but he does know that he is thirsty and that he will get his Coca-Cola if he holds out on water long enough. The adult will vacillate in his reasoning, “Well, I know he really needs water, but he doesn’t like it. I remember that we never gave Coca-Cola to these horses before. But things are different these days. Younger horses have computers and internet… maybe they need soft drinks to quench their thirst. After all, that’s what everyone else gives them. And he is much happier when I give him coke…. And though I hate to admit it, it IS a lot easier.” And the unknowing horse of so few years has now determined how he will live his life; first, with the consent of his owner; then with time, the sanctimonious approval of the owner. The horse will eventually get tired of Coca-Cola and desire something more nourishing, but it won’t be there. The adult will just force more coke down his throat until the horse forgets the idea of drinking anything altogether, and lives an unhappy and unhealthy life forever after.

Now, replace horse with student, water with relevant nourishing education, Coca-Cola with idiotic busywork (otherwise known as the “Crayola Curriculum”), drinking with thinking, and the owner with school. Schools give busywork to all kids equally, allowing students to not think. By the time their minds beg to be used, the schools reply with more pointless busywork. Even if their souls cry out to be useful and virtuous, schools will tell them to wait for college and leave them to listen to the rappers sponsored by Coca-Cola in the meantime. By the time they receive their piece of paper, they have already lost their dreams, their capacity to achieve those dreams -had they existed-, and they desire the life that will keep them from thinking and achieving, two things they have associated with their low self-esteem.

These poor students needs purpose, and school should have provided that purpose. Educators could have done this by removing all sources of time wasting in the young person’s distraction-filled life. They could have shown and provided all the paths to a productive life. They could have thwarted the destructive messages that inculcate young minds today. They could have let the horse find its own place to drink from the long waterway instead of leaving only one place in the river or providing a harmful soft drink. Although illiterates and pleasure-seeking drones graduate in higher and higher proportions every year, this trend can be reversed with a different approach to education. Schools should just allow the students to choose what they will learn and track them according to their abilities.

As it stands, all kids follow the same educational requirements, sit in the same classrooms, and learn at the same pace. The majority either hate what they learn or they hate how they are taught, and they eventually develop a dislike for any kind of learning whatsoever. They need to have a choice in what they learn and how they learn, so they will not learn to hate and blame school.

Of necessity, the choices provided to the student must actually serve a productive purpose in society. Normally, the students could choose between high academic disciplines or vocational disciplines. With the exception of a few necessities for every functioning citizen like literacy, basic math, and basic civics; the student will pursue the required studies of his chosen discipline. Each discipline should allow two tracks: one for the exceptional students who strive for excellence, and another for students who desire competence. As for the students who prove to desire neither excellence nor competence, they will remain isolated from the rest of school where the issues that cause such a aberration can be fully addressed and corrected without stopping the other students from learning. The number of students needing drastic intervention would decrease significantly if elementary schools employed these measures instead letting the problematic study habits fester until high school.

Moreover, when a school gives a student a choice, it also gives that student a goal to pursue. This goal can be an actual set of skills that can help the student and distinguish him from an ignorant child he once was. On the other hand, college is not a goal. Like school, college serves as a means to a goal in life rather than function as a goal in itself. When students have a real goal like obtaining skills for a profitable or fruitful enterprise, they will actively seek edification and develop the discipline necessary for it instead of escape it.

Those that object to tracking and individualizing education as a means to establishing elitism and unfair segregation should look at the rampant apathy that hits American children as soon as they leave elementary school. They find out that they are tiny anonymous ants in a huge mess of a school working with a floating standard of quality. The school has set their unsure path, and the students will have nothing to do with it except how well they comply. They will drift each year through classes and it’s up to their backgrounds in how they respond. However, they know their response, good or bad, will receive the same treatment, so they really don’t exert much of themselves. For their whole academic career, they have no goals except some ambiguous sequel to high school known as college, which many of them could care less about since it offers them little more than what they already have learned to resent in high school. Most of them end up where most people without goals end up, in a life of unceasing mediocrity.

It’s time to give them a choice and stop relegating American students to this vicious cycle. The world’s best educational systems like Finland, Taiwan, and South Korea have recognized the necessity to track student and diversify the curriculum to suit their needs. Maybe it’s time to learn from them, so American students can start learning themselves.