Smarter, Better, Faster, Stronger

I was on Twitter the other day, lazily skimming through baseball game results and NY Times headlines when something caught my eye.  An acquaintance wrote: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."  While that makes a lot of sense, there was something wrong with the picture...

Ah, yes.  This particular writer has proven to me time and again that the school system in major cities is failing - through his own faulty education, certainly, but also through his misguided belief that simply graduating means he's done learning.

Let's not get this twisted, okay?  I am by no means an education snob, but I do believe that we are never done learning.  Never ever ever.  So a school system that teaches kids otherwise - that passing with a C- is adequate to prepare them for the challenges of adult life, that intellectual curiosity isn't important, that you don't need to keep up with new developments in science and technnology to maintain a certain standard of living and professionalism - this is a school system that needs to be overhauled.

Public or private, middle schools and high schools in major cities like Los Angeles are failing our kids every day.  The next generation of "thinkers" are very much like the writer that sparked this whole blog.  He's complacent.  He doesn't make connections between, let's say, plots in classic literature and plots in popular movies or comic books.  He can't make those connections because he wasn't taught to think analytically.

It's not that this kid is stupid (alas, would that I could simply blame cognitive deficiency), it's that he's lazy.  While parenting surely plays a large role in developing the character of one's intellect, schools play just as big a part.  Teachers, more often than not in low-income families such as his, spend more time actively and constructively communicating with children than their own parents.  So I ask of teachers everywhere to try, in as many kids as possible, to foster curiosity and creativity and a need to not just know, but understand, the world around them.

I know there are challenges:  budget cuts and pressure from the higher-ups to keep herding students through the classes because their space is needed by ever more children.  I know that teachers are terribly overworked and stupefyingly underpaid.  I know that they often spend a chunk of their own income on classroom improvements and achievement incentives.  And I know that they truly do care about the health, welfare, and futures of each of their students.

But I also know that kids get lost in the shuffle.  I've met some of these kids, whose lack of curiosity (not to mention gaping holes in their education) is astounding.  It's astonishing to me that they can even function in this world of ever more intelligent smart phones and new developments in social media and video games that require more than a few buttons to operate.  How do they manage to keep up with all of this when they haven't been taught the basics?

They're smart, that's how.  They can figure out the rudimentary functions and means of operation.  But their potential has never been tapped, never been given a means to blossom because they weren't motivated by their parents to excel, they weren't challenged in the classroom, they weren't shown that their classmates might actually like them more for being smart and funny and cool, they haven't seen that it takes more hard work than luck to be a true success in the long term.

All we need to do is show students that knowing a lot, and wanting to know more and truly understand it, can help them achieve their dreams.  We need to foster in them the intellectual curiosity that will make them smarter people, better thinkers, faster workers, and stronger contributors to our global society.