While it’s easy for armchair presidents to say that America’s education curriculum needs to be tougher, the simple fact remains that no change will come to fix our educational system until the desire to be educated in America overcomes the apathy of the youth.
We live in the age of information; we have more academic resources allotted to us than any generation of the past; we have infinite possibilities to obtain an education, but we have become the generation of apathetic ignorance, ignoring those tools which could make us great in exchange for those vices which keep vibrant minds confined to status updates, and keyboard cats.
This battle against apathy is the true fight our generation will undertake. It’s not about a lack of academic resources available to us, nor is it about the strength of Friday’s pop quiz, it’s the battle between will power and the drive to educate ourselves.
Oscar Wilde once said, “Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” It is the education of oneself, and knowledge through one’s own experiences that enables academic enlightenment, not the hard hand of a teacher slapping the chalkboard with a ruler saying, “learn this or suffer the fates a medial job in a life absent of a high school diploma”.
This is not to say that our curriculum is flawless, but only to state that making it tougher for tougher’s sake fixes nothing. I’ll be the first to admit that the right time for changing curriculum has long since passed, and that its resistance to be modernized will surely make the eventual transition more painful. However, to say that it can be fixed by simply giving more course work, ar arbitrarily making tests more difficult with no direction is simply a flex of a form of academic testosterone.
Children are given the gift of benevolence, and we should celebrate that, and not imprison it in the name of academic competition. If anything, toughening the American curriculum promises to increase competition. This reliance on competition with your classmates, which has become a hallmark of the American educational system, claiming that it’s the only way to encourage our students to grow, is a virtual carrot on the end of a stick. But competition itself has become one of our vices, a hindrance to our individuality. We are no longer welcome to explore ourselves because we must competitively judge our self-worth through others.
Toughening the curriculum will only increase this external locus of self, propagandized to us as “the competitive edge”. We must rather encourage students to have an internal drive, not a carrot on the end of a stick, but a flame inside them that fights to align reality and their aspirations.
Now to be sure, to accomplish this, we undoubtedly need to change the American curriculum. We need to emphasize individual and internal value over external worth, we need to realign our educational plans with a developing global and technological world, we need to do so much, however, but to blindly make courses arbitrarily more difficult without any cause or reason other than an ideological reaction to what you see as a deficiency in the education system serves more harm than our students’ youthful apathy.
In short, the responsibility lies with the new generation to desire an education, and not be handed one. All though the road ahead may be one of harsh transition, the trials we endure will give us the opportunity to do more than any generation before; even those with tougher education.