Failures of Education in the Current Era

As I was browsing the internet, I came to thinking about the state of education in the US.  In particular I found that this video on YouTube held many of the same views that I have.  To this end, I felt that it would be interesting to explore more into my views of why education fails in the US and perhaps elsewhere in the world, as this is out of my experience I cannot comment well on it.

To keep this post brief, I will touch upon the one thing that I feel is the most important reason as to why our education system has failed.  To me, the main reason for our education's failure is our view of intelligence.  I'm not quite sure when society began to shift in this way, surely it has been such since before I was born 20 or so years ago, but there is this extreme push towards test results.  It seems as though test results are a better indication of intelligence than anything else.

Tests, however are often an incredibly poor indicator of intelligence.  For one, most standardized testing can be boiled down to an extremely small handful of types of questions.  This means that the most prepared and most studied often are awarded with higher scores than those who are truly intelligent.  Arbitrary facts and contrived passages, that are quite frankly dull to the majority of society, constitute what it is to be intelligent in our minds.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for gauging mathematical and verbal reasoning.  However, the current system is about tricks and strategies that just aren't generalizable to more interesting problems.  Not to mention that they only test the lower bound for those that have already learned further.  For example, given a high school student who is studying multivariable or multivariate calculus, the SAT/ACT are almost insulting in their simplicity.

It shocks me how many people cannot reason about relatively simple things.  For example, most sequences of numbers are relatively easy to understand.  Given the numbers 0,1,1,2,4, and 7, it should not be difficult to see that the next number should be 13, the sum of the previous three numbers.  By the time you get to 4th or 5th grade, such a thing should be able to be abstracted out.  Unfortunately, our schooling system is too focused on rote arithmetic to teach the minor critical thinking skills to find patterns in simple numbers.

To me, intelligence is about understanding what one does not know and getting to knowing those things.  Intelligence should not be measured by arbitrary facts.  Instead it should be bolstered by those facts to gain new insight into how systems work.

--CsMiREK