I Was a Teenage Student

I Was a Teenage Student

I may be in the minority, or, more sadly, the majority, but I have never seen anything horribly wrong with my schooling. This may be because I have attended private schools for most of my life, and only attended a public, state-run institution for three years, or it may be because the effect Jonathan Kozol talks about in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home has been so subtle that I do not notice it. I do have some criticisms of my schooling, however.

When I think of my education as a whole, I think of it divided in to two parts, private and public. As I said before, I have spent most of my life--pre-school through the eighth grade--attending private schools.

In pre-school through the lower grades we were taught the basics--writing and spelling--along with some more important lessons some people take for granted. We were taught to share, to clean up after ourselves, and to be nice to other children. Of course, we took those lessons on Authority, no child in my class objected--they seemed like good ideas to us. Pre-school, I believe, is a good place to teach children the most important lessons, but I do not think enough is done in the early days of children's education to teach them compassion for their fellow human beings. I do not think that that is too young an age to show them the injustice, and the ugly things in this society that they are going to grow up in. I agree with Kozol's attitude towards teachers who say that we should not "bring in... rage and pain" into our children's lives at such a young age. Indeed, "what shall we do when rage walks in the door?"

The next stage of my education I seem to remember is middle school. I went to a private middle school affiliated with the Uni...

... middle of paper ...

...he benefit of wiser parental figures. I often think about the other, disadvantaged kids I went to school with. I think about what they are doing with there lives. I try not to, though, it always makes me a little depressed to think about where our nation is headed. How can the future be bright when the public education system for the majority of children in this country is so dismal? No, this was not the Utopian high school the court had envisioned when they put together this school district.

So I guess I am happy, for the mostpart, with my schooling up until this point. There are some things I would improve upon, but looking at how others went through their education, I become more grateful of mine. I think of myself as a good person, whether I am correct in thinking that, or not. I do not know, however, whether that is because of my education, or in spite of it.