Sitting in the classroom hearing the teacher drone on about some subject you could care less about. This dilemma can prevent students from learning what they need to know.

Our education system in America has been outdated for years. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the adult literacy rate above proficient is only 13%, leaving the other 87% illiterate.

As all other countries progress in the classroom, Americans have become stuck with the education our great grandfathers received. We are stuck in an endless cycle, whose main goal is to try to get us in and out of the system as quickly as possible; even if you don’t understand the information.

However, our education system stays the same. With the No Child Left Behind Program prevents students from being held back a grade level forcing the teachers, even if the student didn’t pass, to move the child to the next grade. Unlike countries like France, the US feels that the best thing is to make a student move forward with their studies. But what if they don’t get it? Despite teachers’ objections, both of my sisters were held behind and because of it they have risen to the top of their class. Making honor roll, even Principal’s List. But without repeating the grade they had not understood the first time, they would have never gotten those achievements.

Teachers having ten-year is not helping as well. Ten-Year is a contract basically stating that after 10 years working as a teacher you can not be fired only passed to a different school, unless you commit some huge crime. Some after they receive that honor, abuse it. Some change their once rigorous course to a show-up-and-get-an-A type class. For me, being in GATE and AP classes didn’t change some teachers bad teaching habits making it difficult for learning anything in those classes. Ultimately making a lot of students in those classes burnt out and frustrated.

At the kindergarten level, about 97% of students can think divergently, a way of thinking which helped people like Einstein come up with formulas like E=mc^2. But with our education system, they have taken away that once flourishing ability forcing students to think in boxes that stop most forms of creativity.

Being labeled with a manufacturing date and shipped off into the world, corners cut and all, won’t help us become the next leaders of America. The old education system isn’t working, so why stick with it? Well it’s simply because the American government believes everything is alright with our system and is choosing not to change it. We need to advocate for change so we can bring America back to being the best. The No Child Left Behind Program isn’t working.

Ken Robinson, an expert of the American Education System said, “Education under No Child Left Behind is based on not diversity but conformity. What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners. It’s a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement.”

by ARIELLA APPLEBY