The Heart of Education

I know that oppression exists at varying degrees and at varying levels, but I am going to focus on oppression of the creative mind in relation to education at the grade school level.

I feel that the most oppressive instance of academia is the lack of creativity afforded to the teachers and the strict adherence to standards and benchmarks instituted by a curriculum that has been constructed by upper management business people who have never set foot in a classroom.

Teachers feel locked into a system that lacks autonomy. They become stagnant and unmotivated because they are not given opportunities to work the curriculum to support all students needs. They are afraid of loosing their job if they don’t conform; they begin doing what they’re told. Educators are forced to move through the curriculum too quickly. They are teaching to the test.  They work at a hurried pace, narrating, pontificating, not allowing freedom of engagement with their students.

I feel some solutions to academic oppression are:

·         Stop oppressing the teachers. Give them back their autonomy. You hire them to teach so you know that they are capable of teaching. You should not dictate how they should do their job. The teacher goes into the teaching profession because they love it. Telling a teacher how to teach shows a lack of trust and demeans their professionalism.

·         Lack of funding: You can’t have a cohesive learning environment without the necessary funding. Some districts lack the books necessary to teach the curriculum. This means that one student is getting a better education then the other student because they have the necessary tools. Also, funding is needed to put programs in place for students of varying needs, i.e. resource, reading resource, gifted, special day, etc.

·         Bring back the arts so that you can teach to the different learning styles.

Education focuses too much on the errors made instead of thinking, “how can we make it work?” There are always going to be pros and cons of a system, but it should be up to the educator to weigh out the pros and cons and see if the effects have a long-term positive or negative outcome. Learning is difficult. Educators want to keep positive attributes and propel students forward instead of pushing them forward and driving them like cattle. We want students to be excited to learn on their own.