Education system requires overhaul

Title: Red, White & Bold

This week I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the renowned children’s television show “Sesame Street” would celebrate its 40th birthday. Just as my parents did, and I suspect my children will, I grew up enjoying “Sesame Street,” and before starting kindergarten, it taught me important lessons about shapes, phonetics and rudimentary math skills. After all of this time, with its same basic format, “Sesame Street” is still going strong. For this I am glad. Why change a good thing?

But what about when cornerstone institutions of our education system aren’t working? What, then, should we do with them? While at work on Monday, a co-worker showed me an essay that he had to write for a class. He had to take an anti-Obama position and wrote critically on the failures of No Child Left Behind.

I was a bit shocked in the beginning. I remember for years Democrats lamenting the bureaucratic farce that became No Child Left Behind and the serious strains that it put on states, teachers, children and their families. Then he reminded me, and I did my own research. Despite some basic pledges like increasing our amount of teachers and expanding access to higher education, Obama never specifically outlined a plan to fundamentally change the way we do business from kindergarten to 12th grade. What Obama has done is to point to his commitment to funding the crucial cuts made by the Bush administration as the key to fixing the problem. He is wrong.

In fact, as Vice President Joe Biden said in a debate when running for president two years ago, the entire system needs to be scrapped, and we need to start from the beginning. The first issue is the vast inequality that we end up with as a result of each state having its own educational standards. Our children should be learning the same skills, at the same time, and neither region, race, class, sex or anything else should have any impact on their education. This goal will only be met when we have one basic national curriculum, with national standards. Obviously one size never fits all, and states and teachers should be able to curtail lesson plans to better serve their classes, but this should never be used as an excuse to dumb down the material being taught for the sake of passing a student to the next grade.

This system only hurts the student, particularly in mathematics where knowledge of early concepts build upon each other. We must have a system that pays particular attention to our girls and their performance in math and science. By relegating these subjects as being simply for boys, we aren’t tapping into the God-given potential that our young women have. In the ever-developing areas of science and technology, we start off with a tremendous disadvantage if half of our population isn’t considered “worthy” or equally as talented as the other half. And on this subject, while we all hear about the importance of math and science education regularly, there is one more practical key area where our students are simply not offered the best available, and that is foreign language.

Two years of Spanish in high school simply won’t cut it, particularly in a world where strict boundaries with respect to business and immigration are a thing of the past. We should begin much earlier, in middle school, with a minimum of three but ideally five years spent learning a second language. And we shouldn’t be stuck with the traditional options of Spanish and French but also allow equal access for our kids to learn German, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Bengali.

Despite the many pressing issues in our education system, we should all be glad that the United States has the best colleges and universities in the world. But all too often access to these institutions are simply out of reach for many (we can save this for another column). This is why it is so important for us to focus on primary education. For those who cannot access college, their minds should be no less strong or ready for the future than those who pursue further education. A girl in Massachusetts should have the same opportunity to succeed as her counterpart in Mississippi. Seldom do Democrats and Republicans agree on issues. With education there are also tremendous disagreements, but voices from the far left as well as the far right are calling this debate what it is: the civil rights issue of our time.

— Sam Smith IV is a junior in journalism and electronic media. He can be reached at ssmit162@utk.edu.