Receiving education in America once meant a chance to escape the ramifications of a limited knowledge. It once provided children a chance to better themselves and move beyond the implications of imprudence that could be forced upon their impressionable minds through those who essentially are in the same position as they are. It’s through education did America once ensure that children learned so they wouldn’t become incompetent thus leading them to become productive citizens of a dynamic land of opportunity.
Today, the definition of education has been fundamentally altered from the definition that it held 20 years ago. The definition of education today is intertwined with the definitions of government, big pharmaceutical companies, special interest, and politically based decisions. In order to understand the definition of education today one must understand educations own definitions that puts labels on everything and everyone. In education today, students are defined by subgroups, and are treated accordingly. Students who can’t conform to the beliefs that all students are alike and therefore should work as a “unit” are defined as ADD or ADHD. However, at times these students are simply defined as “unreachable” or “defective” for reasons in their own are beyond comprehensible. If a student can’t conform to the ideology that all students should be able to take standardized exams that produce a “universal result” than such student is incompetent or suffers from “undefined learning disabilities” and therefore should be subjected to yet more testing. If a student has the tendency to think outside of the paradigm he is unruly or objectionable and therefore is a “disruption to the learning environment.” It is these definitions that define education in America today, students are defined as failures because of atrocities that are not in their domain of control and it gets no better for teachers.
America has a complacent addiction to defining things that are indefinable, that are unexplainable and immeasurable. We are too eager to become complacent to our fears of not being able to see progression at work and such addiction has gotten us hooked on the dangerous practice of trying to define everything. The second America’s education system started to define students by ability and inability we started embarking upon the path to academic regression and the second we started conforming to the ideology of regressive and repressive laws like NCLB that define children based on zip code, race, gender, and ethnicity we essentially sped up the effects of regression.
When I look at the ruins of what was once a good system that provided equitable education to children at some point in time I see a sea of students eager to learn. I see a sea of students who are misidentified, over-defined and under-appreciated. I see students who are failed; I see legacies ended before they even began. I see the look of hopelessness in the eyes of students who can tell they are being failed due to our addiction to define, redefine, and then define again. Education should allow students to define themselves, it should encourage such definition to take place from the student but instead it forces teachers and administrators to define such definition for the child. If anything the definition of education at this point is merely a system that defines the definitions of definitions that hold little validity. This is a horrid injustice to students because if educations definitions define a student than a he or she will just conform to such definitions and therefore the student to essentially put him/herself along a track that potentially limits ingenuity, potential and creativity.
This is why students should stand up to educations definitions that limit them and their ingenuity and refuse to conform to such definitions. Students need to demand that they not be held to such definitions but to their true potential. Students need to demand that they have the right to be unique and not act as “units” so that they can embark upon of the ingenuity that resides within their young vibrant minds. Until that becomes the universal definition of education I will work relentlessly to lead students to revolutions of change in every way imaginable until we are freed from the conformity’s of restrictive, redundant, and mundane definitions.