Education Evolution

Today, the New York Times wrote about a new program that is being implemented in a school district in New Jersey, which sounds very progressive, and seems to be a movement that wants to sincerely address the pitfalls of the education bureaucracy that infests the academic halls of the United States. Now, most of you may think, well the problem with having all teachers lead education, and its policies, would be like having too many chiefs, or chefs, whatever the cliche, that this may cause too many conflicts of interest as far as policy guidance, and that students might experience a degradation in quality of education due to inconsistent curriculums or digressive learning. This type of thinking lends me to believe that education has been held hostage by administrative policies and procedures that simply do not adjust quickly enough to today's conventions, and often fail to diverge enough, in order to supply a well-rounded, and fully informative education for all students. In other words, present day education policy, places students in a proverbial box, and over time starts eliminating necessary branches of learning. These branches supply adequate knowledge of where a student should or shouldn't apply one's education as to get the proper training for his or her future career.

In my career as a student, no matter at which level, whether it was grade school, or college, the teachers who taught best, were not just teachers, but simply facilitators of any if not all knowledge. Is it adequate enough for a student to be provided knowledge based in a curriculum that has first passed through Federal oversight, then down through the state education departments, and through the local level administration, and finally to the teacher's desk, where all along the way administrators slash out valuable concepts, remove what they perceived to be wasteful resource spending, and by the time the teacher begins writing on the chalkboard, the knowledge available to the student is watered down, and therefore limited in scope? Many would agree, that placing students within strict educational boundaries only hinders progressive and critical thinking, the ability to navigate and discover concepts through maximum exposure. Is it any wonder that kids today, diagnosed with learning disabilities are viewed as being learning "disabled". Are they in fact disabilities? Or are they being disabled by an educational system with too many learning boundaries, and not enough proper facilitation of concepts?

For instance, attention deficit disorder (ADD) is considered to be a learning disability (LD) by most educational professionals and psychologists. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, "4.5 million children 5-17 years of age have ever been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2006", and each year since 1997, the rate of ADHD diagnosing has steadily increased at a rate of 3% each year. The new breed, or should it be stated as a trend, of learning disabilities is the autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which is also on the rise in younger students as well. This trend of psychologically categorizing students is yet another way the educational system tends to further limit the capabilities of giving a diagnosed student a broader exposure to learning. Instead, most students who have been diagnosed with a learning disability are usually placed in a special learning environment, even though the administrators require the full inclusion of these types of students in the normal classroom setting, a student with LD may require more than the average stimuli provided in a conventional classroom. It seems education administrators are committing devolution of the learning mind.

Theoretically, teachers should provide an environment that has multiple forms of learning paths for students, whether they are learning disabled or not. Since the teachers are the frontline of education, it is critical that they produce a free-form curriculum that would facilitate all students' needs. The administrators do not have the capacity or the experience in the classroom to provide such a customized experience of learning for the students, and the current practice they apply simply places each student on the same educational playing field, through heavily refined curricula, that acts as a huge filter, failing to expose the students to the maximum experience of knowledge. It is extremely important to recognize learning disabilities as abilities instead, because what the current education system does, is place a multi-capacity mind into a smaller and heavily restricted model of learning, and it would seem the system is therefore learning and teaching disabled.

Maybe what today's student needs is a more loose form of education, or a learning environment that is not restrained by an overwhelming amount of bureaucratic rules, policies, and faulty procedures that create a hindrance to effective learning. A school that can offer a curriculum wholly composed by teachers may create a classroom situation where multiple teachers are present, playing off one another in order to capture the random attention spans that students with disabilities like ADHD have. Sticking to the curriculum is anti-educational, as mentioned before, it constrains the exposure to concepts, so it would be effective to allow a teacher to branch from the curriculum, in order to better explain concepts to students using multiple facets, instead of just one.