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What are we going to do about education?

© R. L. Head

This is the first of a series of articles on the topic of education. It is obviously an important and popular subject. Politicians see that it is necessary to address the issue in order to succeed with the voters. But what is all this attention really accomplishing?

I believe that the biggest problem we face is the fact that our education system has not changed significantly since the 1950s. We have not redefined our goals, expectations, and needs. The amount of information our children need to survive in this world has grown dramatically. Yet children attend school for roughly the same amount of time they did when televisions were new and computers were most commonly found in science fiction.

The world has changed in ways that could not have been envisioned 50 years ago. The pace of life is frenetic. A large number of mothers now work outside the home. Childcare needs are critical. Yet schools continue to operate using a schedule which was designed to respond to a world where the father worked, and the mother was the homemaker who was waiting for the school children when they returned home at the end of the school day.

Children are bombarded with an unimaginable number of distractions. Those of us who grew up in the 50s, 60s, and even 70s, only had a few television stations to choose from. There were no computers and electronic games. The world was less crowded and moved at a slower speed. Today's children have a multitude of exciting and enticing things to do. This can have a detrimental effect on their lives because children are not always capable of making the best decisions, and parents are too frequently drawn away from spending as much time with children as is necessary due to the growing obligations and demands of the modern world.

So what are we to do? As a computer programmer, I learned that the better your definition and understanding of the problem, the easier it is to solve that problem. Before we can address our educational needs, we need to understand the problem. There are many areas of concern. Some of them include:

1) What do we expect of our high school graduates? 2) What information do they need to succeed in a world in which change is the only thing that can be counted on? 3) How can we help students make the transition into the world after high school?