Eternal Sunshine

Very.

I am passionate about this topic and could go on about it for days but I won’t bore you. If you would like to hear my off topic, over-dramatic tangent about this subject, read on. 

I always remind myself that I’m one of the lucky ones. I live in arguable THE “BEST” public school district in the entire nation: Fairfax County Public Schools. The Infamous FCPS. More specifically it is a conglomerate of all of the wealthy school districts in Northern Virginia and Maryland (Loudon, Prince William, Montgomery, etc).

To be honest, people who live here hate it. People who don’t live here don’t even know who we are. And I think only a few of us realize how lucky we are. 

I’m a sucker for inspirational films and educational documentaries. With such little to watch movies, I like to make it worth my time by being able to learn something from it. And I’m just a big nerd. I’ve watched movies like Freedom Writers and documentaries such as The Lottery, Race to Nowhere, and as I type this, Waiting for Superman. When I watch these films, or even when I just think about education, I get so worked up and angry. 

I think it’s a goddamn shame, the condition of the American education system. And world education as a whole. This is America. We are supposed to be leaders and visionaries…but what are we doing? 

The failing districts have high schoolers reading at first through third grade reading levels. So-called “successful” districts such as FCPS have its students reading at college level but only for the sake of monotonous standardized tests that gage not knowledge but rather attention spans and the ability to pencil in little circles. Or sometimes they get creative and use ovals, just to throw us off.

I think they’re doing it all wrong. In elementary school they train us for middle school. In middle school they train us for high school. In high school they shove the idea of college down our throats. And only then, in a frenzy of a panic at the realization that we are anything but prepared, we walk feebly into institutions of higher education. If we graduate. And only then, with a measly four years and tens of thousands of dollars, we formulate an idea of what direction we want to take in life and then try to get there. If extraterrestrial beings landed on Earth and we had to explain this whole process to them, they would probably laugh in our faces. 

Isn’t it ironic that we hate school? I know I do. I dread getting up in the morning to learn things I’ll “never use in the real life.” Meanwhile, most of the world is yearning just for the ability to read and write and perform simple computations. But we can’t even give them that much. Not even in our own country. I work with elementary school kids in FCPS who can’t even do those things. 

Okay I finished the movie now…these always make me want to become a teacher…or maybe I should open a school some day…It’s too bad the most highly educated people usually try to pursue corporate/ other careers rather than becoming teachers. 

If you’re interested in watching Waiting for Superman, here is a link to the first part. (It’s also on Netflix). Most of the documentaries promote similar ideas and use the same statistics…but it still gets me every time.