Education Gaps

"American society started to coast in the 1990s, when our thurd postwar generation came of age. The dot-com boom left too many people with the impression that they could get rich without investing in hard work [...] Who needed an education? Who needed to sweat over an engineering degree?" (325).

Friedman, above, discusses a common idea that I constantly ponder: Why are Americans becoming so lazy?

The answer is not too difficult. With increasing technology, many things are done for us much easier than they were in the past. Look at the washing machine, the microwave, the dishwasher, the INTERNET, etc. Everything, today, is made easier by new and innovative tools that essentially do the job for us. Our time is cut in half by these machines, allowing us more free time to relax.

These inventions are great, but they produce a lazy nation, especially regarding education and the work force. Friedman discusses the education gap at the top, implying that we are not educating enough young people in advanced math, science, and engineering. I think that any educational subject could be applied here, though. He discusses how young people have to master the fundamentals in order to excell at and tackle these advanced studies, but fundamentals appear "boring" and "not fun" to people anymore. He says, "The culture now is geared to having fun" (338). How true is that?

These fundamentals and hard work that is necessary for certain advanced jobs that will truly help this country progress in the future are not happening right now. We need work ethic, something that is becoming abandoned because of this laziness, and this idea that we don't have to work hard to make money.

Even students going to college aren't using these high-level skills we need in order to compete and catch up to other nations. With 26.4 million college graduates in 2003, only 31% fulfill these high-level skills (340). We can't be the powerhouse we think we're going to be if we're performing at this level.

This extra free time, I mentioned above, is not going to productive studies, but to television watching, gaming, instant messaging, and phone calls. Friedman writes that "the literacy of college students has dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the internet," thus, "we're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels" (340). Okay, this is where we come in. Our job is to teach literacy, among multiple texts, technological and not. We need to provide different texts which are appealing to students' interests--not throwing age-old literary texts at them. If we stimulate interest in learning, students will be more apt to be life-long learners--an ultimate teaching aim.

At the bottom of the education gap, many schools are still teaching the same materials and strategies as they did so many years earlier. We need to change with the times. In our country, since each school's curriculum, teachers, materials, budget, and principles are dependent per school, each has a different way to do it with different means of income. Poor schools have little materials, less qualified teachers, which leads to a poor education, and vice versa. Friedman says that other countries fund differently, making their education system more effective: "[they] fund their schools according to what it will take to deliver a standard curriculum, and then they take the money out of the state's general budget" (346). We can't change the system, but we can try to work with it and around it. We can try to give our students the best education we can with the resources we have. We can write grants and use what we have in order to make up for this fault.

School is supposed to be the "agent for social mobility," but we know that that is not true for all people in all areas of the country. I know that I cannot be the next president or a pre-med student. We need to teach for social justice.

But the main point is, that "there are fewer and fewer decent jobs for those without a lot of knowledge" (347). So what do we do? We want our students to have jobs. We want them to be smart. We want them to succeed. So, we need to make learning "fun." We need to incorporate their interests and technologies to appeal to them. Learning is diverse, coming from many forms and in many, many ways. We have to be creative, take what we have, stimulate interest, and instill student-centered classrooms that promote life-long learning and life-long literacy. We can't do this with desks in rows, reading aloud a dull book with a dull theme. We have to meet students where they're at and then push them to have work ethic and interest so that they will be able to succeed far after they leave the classroom.