Education Culture in America
Those of you who have watched or heard of President Obama's 2011 State of the Union Address will have heard of his plans for education reform. While much of it does address things like teachers and family involvement, a lot of it was just how to fund.
I'll be honest, at that point, I snorted. Our education is useless for our students, and no amount of funding is going to fix it.
Why? Because the problem isn't in education or schools or teachers (at least, not all the problem!) So what's the real problem?
Simple.
America does not like smart people.
Turn on just about any cartoon that kids watch today, and look at what happens to the smart kids (the nerds), and the average or dumb kids in comparison. It should be rather self-explanatory.
Yeah, sure, the nerd might get cool stuff, fight bad guys, even save the day! But come class time, they're still going to be mocked, ostracized, beat up by the dumb guys and rejected by all the pretty dumb girls (we'll just not even go into the ratio of smart girls to smart boys in cartoons, m'kay?) Is it any wonder that kids don't want to be smart? They're conditioned practically since birth to see intelligence as an undesirable and weak trait, and a nerd as an outcast, while seeing beauty and/or athleticism as a trait of strength and success. And the stereotypes that go with 'jocks/hotts' and 'nerds' really don't help.
One reason I loved Avatar: The Last Airbender so much was because of how it turned these two stereotype-ridden archetypes on their heads by putting them together in one person.
Sokka prides himself on his body, but everyone else values his mind. While he maintains his physical and warrior prowess, he is also a guy of intellect who the group as a whole will turn to when faced with a complex puzzle or situation. Rather than try to rely on sheer strength to shoulder his way through enemy schemes, he looks for ways to bring them down smartly, ranging from infiltration to manipulation to, admittedly, sheer force when it will actually work. Despite living in a world with magic and bending of elements, he still looks for a scientific explanation for everything - and yet, he is also a "jock", with most of the personality stereotypes that come with it: arrogance, narcissism, excess focus athleticism/warrior prowess. He has the entire Jock personality, and yet when it came time to pick a "mini-vacation", he selection was "The Library!" (which he actually shouted outloud in the middle of an inn - as in, he wasn't ashamed that this was his pick).
Now if only we had more characters like that. We have occasional ones, like Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter series, who at first seems like just your every-day nerd who spends too much of her time in books - only to be the one who regularly saves the day with her smarts, and be a total badass warrior in books six and seven. And a bit more importantly in her depiction, she isn't outcast from the rest of the Hogwarts student body - she has many friends, including the two jocks and other heroes of the story Harry and Ron, and she even has her fair share of interested boys...the three notable ones (Viktor, Cormac, and of course, Ron) all jocks (Quidditch players - in Viktor's case, an international legend). The amount of "enemies" she makes among fellow girls/students is no more than any other given students' fair share of school-age pettiness (and the amount of Death Eater enemies she has are another story entirely).
And...dude, in very popular media, that's all I can think of off the top of my head. WHY?
I'm not saying we need to stop children from watching cartoons or take over them, but we need to start focusing on media which encourages nerdery in social contexts - as in, in the book or show, the nerd is not outcast, not beat up, and shown as a trait that leads to success in both school life and real life, and won't make you lose your friends or popularity status to do it.
Because let's face it - nerds don't actually get beat up or ostracized anymore. All around them, older kids who watch the news can see that when we talk of successful people, it's mostly nerds, like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs. These cartoons are being written and produced by people who haven't set foot in school in decades, and our culture has long moved on from that. TV hasn't. (Seriously, schools shows, would it really kill you to go and ask a bunch of kids what school is really like, today?)
But by the time they get to that state and realized where their success lies, it's too late - they've all been raised to think otherwise. They've invested themselves in other areas and talents, they've completely fooled themselves so deep into their distaste for intelligence that now they can't move otherwise.
Time and family energy spent on education isn't the cause of Asian countries' educational powerhouse tendencies, but a symptom of it, a manifestation - everyone, from families to government, are willing to invest so much in education because their culture values education, they collectively value intellect and intelligence and strength of the mind, as well as strength of the body, if not moreso in some cases.
We have no respect for educators, except for maybe those who teach in good colleges. We are always more proud to say our Significant Other is a Strong Athlete or a Beautiful Actor rather than say they are a Wonderful Teacher. As Obama mentioned in his State of the Union Address, in other nations, teachers are hailed for what they do, they are given more respect - they are thought of as 'nation builders', while ours are thought of as 'baby-sitters'.
They prefer to invest in education while we prefer to invest in prisons (and we'll just not even get into the fact that more than a third of inmates across the nation are in prison for non-violent drug possession, and have no history of violence to speak of).
We spend the most per child in education in the world, but we have some of the stupidest kids among developed nations. No amount of funding is going to fix the American education problem because funding isn't the problem - our culture is. And until we fix it, America is doomed to fall behind forever.
I'll be honest, at that point, I snorted. Our education is useless for our students, and no amount of funding is going to fix it.
Why? Because the problem isn't in education or schools or teachers (at least, not all the problem!) So what's the real problem?
Simple.
America does not like smart people.
Turn on just about any cartoon that kids watch today, and look at what happens to the smart kids (the nerds), and the average or dumb kids in comparison. It should be rather self-explanatory.
Yeah, sure, the nerd might get cool stuff, fight bad guys, even save the day! But come class time, they're still going to be mocked, ostracized, beat up by the dumb guys and rejected by all the pretty dumb girls (we'll just not even go into the ratio of smart girls to smart boys in cartoons, m'kay?) Is it any wonder that kids don't want to be smart? They're conditioned practically since birth to see intelligence as an undesirable and weak trait, and a nerd as an outcast, while seeing beauty and/or athleticism as a trait of strength and success. And the stereotypes that go with 'jocks/hotts' and 'nerds' really don't help.
One reason I loved Avatar: The Last Airbender so much was because of how it turned these two stereotype-ridden archetypes on their heads by putting them together in one person.
Sokka prides himself on his body, but everyone else values his mind. While he maintains his physical and warrior prowess, he is also a guy of intellect who the group as a whole will turn to when faced with a complex puzzle or situation. Rather than try to rely on sheer strength to shoulder his way through enemy schemes, he looks for ways to bring them down smartly, ranging from infiltration to manipulation to, admittedly, sheer force when it will actually work. Despite living in a world with magic and bending of elements, he still looks for a scientific explanation for everything - and yet, he is also a "jock", with most of the personality stereotypes that come with it: arrogance, narcissism, excess focus athleticism/warrior prowess. He has the entire Jock personality, and yet when it came time to pick a "mini-vacation", he selection was "The Library!" (which he actually shouted outloud in the middle of an inn - as in, he wasn't ashamed that this was his pick).
Now if only we had more characters like that. We have occasional ones, like Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter series, who at first seems like just your every-day nerd who spends too much of her time in books - only to be the one who regularly saves the day with her smarts, and be a total badass warrior in books six and seven. And a bit more importantly in her depiction, she isn't outcast from the rest of the Hogwarts student body - she has many friends, including the two jocks and other heroes of the story Harry and Ron, and she even has her fair share of interested boys...the three notable ones (Viktor, Cormac, and of course, Ron) all jocks (Quidditch players - in Viktor's case, an international legend). The amount of "enemies" she makes among fellow girls/students is no more than any other given students' fair share of school-age pettiness (and the amount of Death Eater enemies she has are another story entirely).
And...dude, in very popular media, that's all I can think of off the top of my head. WHY?
I'm not saying we need to stop children from watching cartoons or take over them, but we need to start focusing on media which encourages nerdery in social contexts - as in, in the book or show, the nerd is not outcast, not beat up, and shown as a trait that leads to success in both school life and real life, and won't make you lose your friends or popularity status to do it.
Because let's face it - nerds don't actually get beat up or ostracized anymore. All around them, older kids who watch the news can see that when we talk of successful people, it's mostly nerds, like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs. These cartoons are being written and produced by people who haven't set foot in school in decades, and our culture has long moved on from that. TV hasn't. (Seriously, schools shows, would it really kill you to go and ask a bunch of kids what school is really like, today?)
But by the time they get to that state and realized where their success lies, it's too late - they've all been raised to think otherwise. They've invested themselves in other areas and talents, they've completely fooled themselves so deep into their distaste for intelligence that now they can't move otherwise.
Time and family energy spent on education isn't the cause of Asian countries' educational powerhouse tendencies, but a symptom of it, a manifestation - everyone, from families to government, are willing to invest so much in education because their culture values education, they collectively value intellect and intelligence and strength of the mind, as well as strength of the body, if not moreso in some cases.
We have no respect for educators, except for maybe those who teach in good colleges. We are always more proud to say our Significant Other is a Strong Athlete or a Beautiful Actor rather than say they are a Wonderful Teacher. As Obama mentioned in his State of the Union Address, in other nations, teachers are hailed for what they do, they are given more respect - they are thought of as 'nation builders', while ours are thought of as 'baby-sitters'.
They prefer to invest in education while we prefer to invest in prisons (and we'll just not even get into the fact that more than a third of inmates across the nation are in prison for non-violent drug possession, and have no history of violence to speak of).
We spend the most per child in education in the world, but we have some of the stupidest kids among developed nations. No amount of funding is going to fix the American education problem because funding isn't the problem - our culture is. And until we fix it, America is doomed to fall behind forever.