First I would like to say that Keneth Robinson is a magnificently intelligent man on the subject of education. I have watched a few of his lectures on the subject and every time I do I just find myself saying… “That is SO right!” This is one of my other favorite lectures by him if you want to check it out (or have time).
Anyway, back to the blog assignment.
The videos point to very abstract solutions approaching a reform of the education system, if any solutions at all. I think they approach the subject at a more factual level and present the problems rather than solve them. The idea that the education system will ever be perfect is far fetched though. In a world for everything to work “correctly” people would more than likely have to share the same view on how things should be done and quite frankly… they don’t. This flows into the subject of politics and education and how the two subjects affect each other. Politics are always a very touchy subject- one that I do not like to get into or enjoy listening to. So, to me, I think that quite often politics will just put education on their platform to become elected but once people are elected to office they, more often than not, do not address the issue fully. Now, this is not because they do not truly care about the subject, I feel as though there are many other problems that just end up taking priority. Also, another thing that I thought of while watching the video is that (now that prisons can be privatized) there is almost an incentive to not improve education.
“The state spends 33,000 dollars a year on each prisoner. Which makes the average cost of a prison term (4 years) $132,000. The average private school costs 8,300 a year. So for the same price as housing an inmate for 4 years we (the government really) could have sent a kid to private school from kindergarten through 12th grade and still had over $24,000 leftover for college.”
-From the video
I think that the above statement has a pretty big impact on the education budget. I do not have a perfect solution for cutting the budget for state prisons and penitentiaries, however I think that something is very wrong with how much is being spent on an inmate every year versus the amount of money it takes to get a student a “quality” education in this country. Now, I am not saying that you cannot get a decent education at a public school because I went to a public school my whole life and I am confident enough to say that I was able to get a quality education. However, my mom was a teacher when I was in school and she always made sure I was in the right teacher’s class. I was also in the honors track for 80% of my classes. I think that a lot has to change before we can fix the education system. Family life would have to be monitored to ensure kids are being taken care of properly and have a nurturing environment to flourish in, in order to do that we would have to make sure that every pregnancy was a wanted pregnancy or that people could afford to take care of a kid, you see? There are many other issues that would need to be fixed before education. Just because we would add back arts to education, give them more money to improve facilities, get rid of standardized testing, or separate kids by their intellectual ability rather than age does not mean that the schools are going to improve. Those fixes are not enough to change how people approach education or the stigma that comes along with public education.
